Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

by Gray, Alasdair

  “Then open the daw and lead us in, Hjordis.”

  The door opens on a staircase much steeper than that which rises to the attics, and unlike the attic stair it is windowless. It ends in a loft under the central shed of the roof, and lit by big skylights through which nothing can be seen but the summits of surrounding chimneystacks and a small white cloud in the blue. Huge crossbeams and struts under the skylights cast bars of shadow on a floor whose centre is covered by six edge-to-edge carpets, they do not reach the loft’s dark edges and corners. They are well-worn carpets; this loft has clearly been used as a lumber-room, box room and games room for generations. It contains so many things to play with, look into, climb over and hide behind that merely staring around from the same spot gives a minute of pure pleasure. Suddenly Harry walks to a rocking horse of the unsafe Victorian kind, its hooves fixed to wooden crescents. Sedately she mounts and starts rocking. Linda squeals and runs to a half-open wardrobe with a cracked mirror on the door, 1920s coats and dresses hung inside above a decade of footwear. The twins join her as she rummages.

  “I will show you something special,” says the headmistress, leading Hjordis apart from the others, “In one of yaw public addresses you called me bourgeois. You wa quite correct. My family did not build this house. It was purchased in 1827 by my great-great-grandfatha, who made money by providing the betta part of London with splendid drains. This loft was the favourite haunt of his son, his son’s son, his son’s son’s son (who was my fatha) and his son, who was my brotha.”

  They approach an eight-legged billiard table with a network of wee railway-tracks on the faded green cloth. The headmistress lifts and winds with a key the clockwork of a Hornby locomotive, couples it to a goods train with tiny cows, sheep and milk cans in the open trucks, and releases it. With small pistons churning it pulls out of a perfect tin model of Crewe station in the 1930s, snakes away between bright cardboard bungalows and factories of that period, then climbs an easy gradient through a cardboard pine forest on to a Meccano replica of the Forth railway bridge. This spans a looking glass laid flat and grey with dust, but made oceanic by a fleet of battleships on it, beside a Spanish galleon in full sail, three pleasure yachts, two china swans, a shore of real seashells where a stuffed seagull stands. The sizes of these, in reverse scale to the possible, seem a miracle of perspective. The train slows as it leaves the bridge and comes to halt half in and half out of a tunnel through the base of a rock with Edinburgh castle on top exquisitely modelled in papier mâché. A battalion of bright little Gordon Highlanders is formed on the esplanade; knights in mediaeval armour stand on the higher battlements and turrets.

  “This used to be my secret kingdom,” says the headmistress, sighing, “My brotha built it. I helped him. He was the only man in my life. Most little gels worship tha olda brothas, I am told. I may have worshipped mine too much. He fell at the retreat from Dunkirk. Perhaps I am the only British woman living who remembas a British soldia who died at Dunkirk. The British public wa told the retreat was a sawt of triumph, to stop them seeing it was an avoidable fiasco caused by addlepated senia officas telling a dud government that the Germans would neva try to fight us seriously. Do you like this place, Hjordis?”

  “I do, Ethel. Yes.”

  “Then it is all yaws – on condition that you take nothing out. I will not set foot hia again befoa you leave this school. What you tried to do to Harriet in the shrubbery was pretty awful, but if she and Linda play happily hia unda yaw supavision I will forget that. It is very thrilling to deliberately rob a smalla person of all dignity, but from now on you will resist that temptation. You despise my brand of liberalism of cawse, but did you know that on the island of Sark is a boarding school even more private and expensive than this one? It is run by two enthusiastic fascists with an insane, unscientific and highly fashionable faith in shock treatment: also aversion therapy. In my school, as you know, I learn everything that happens. If I eva again discovad you had made Harriet or Linda miserable fo any reason at all I would expel you. I would also give yaw guardians such a report, and such advice, that they would send you to that school on Sark, wha yaw very soul would be painfully twisted into a vile and unnatural shape to prove a shameful theory. The staff would be careful not to make a vegetable of you, but you would often beg them to do so – in vain. Look hard at my face. Hjordis. Do you think I am joking?”

  Hjordis looks. The headmistress is smiling – all her large perfect teeth are visible. Hjordis shudders.

  “Am I joking, Hjordis?”

  Trembling violently, Hjordis shakes her head in urgent denial.

  “Good! Now run away and enjoy yawself. I will go below and have a snack sent up from the kitchen. And you had betta wash yaw face, Hjordis. Those who use a lot of thick make-up should avoid strong sensations.”

  The headmistress skips downstairs, thankful for her drama-school training and relieved that the school on Sark does not exist – for half a minute she thought it did. Her brother died a month before the Dunkirk retreat of a haemorrhage unconnected with military stress. She never knew or liked him much and still thinks his obsession with miniature worlds was unhealthy – why manipulate toys when there are so many real people to play with and rearrange? Several children have enjoyed the loft since the school started, for twice before she has used it to seduce or bribe a troublesome clique. And now her four youngest and most difficult pupils play in a secure place near by with her one bothersome teenager, and are grateful for the privilege.

  Linda is so grateful that a fortnight later she brings the headmistress her father’s record and says,

  “Brike it if you want to.”

  “No!” says the headmistress, “He is a fine singa and these songs delight millions. I will keep it fo a yia, and you will like it even moa when you get it back. It will no longa obsess you because yaw own voice will sound quite different then.”

  A year later Linda speaks in the main dialect of the British inheriting and investing class. She condescends to her father in an amused ironical drawl which makes him feel his money has been well spent, but it destroys her friendship with Harry. This develops slowly for a few months, giving both of them a new experience of confidence and hope, then for no obvious reason the friendship dies. Both feel sad, lonely and betrayed. Harry cannot be friendly with someone whose voice does not strike her as comically coarse and ill bred. Twenty seven years pass before she meets Senga.

  THE PROPOSAL

  SENGA is still a schoolgirl before contraceptive pills are cheap and widely used. In these years many girls under eighteen have no steady boyfriend, those with one are usually virgins, a popular girl can be friendly with several boys who do not necessarily dislike each other or distrust her. Senga at fifteen has a reckless gaiety which many find attractive. Instinctive caution usually inclines her to Tom who is not very amusing or good looking. He is tall but walks as if ashamed of that. He dresses well, but moves and sits as though to stop his clothes getting creased. He is two years older than Senga and her other friends find him dull. They belong to a small group who attend the same school and meet most evenings in a local café. Tom has more pocket money or is more generous than the others. He buys drinks for the group which it would not consume if expenses were shared equally. Senga’s other friends think this is Tom’s way of buying the pleasure of their company and the pleasure of sometimes walking home with Senga, though she never invites him inside. But Senga is not mercenary. What she likes in Tom is her power over him.

  She feels it one evening on the stairway of a tower block owned by the district council. They come by lift to the fourteenth floor and instead of going to the door of her home she lets him persuade her onto the stairs, which can be used to compensate for the difference in their height. It is too late for children to be playing there and far too early for dossers or thieves. She lets him embrace her, and slip his hands under her jacket, then under her sweater. He lacks courage to pluck her blouse out of her jeans waistband and grope under that, but the mo
st intimate sensation in his life is the warm soft feel of her back through thin nylon, also the softness of her neck beneath his lips, for he lacks courage to rise to her mouth. She is amused and intrigued by the changes in his breathing, by the fifth limb growing suddenly out from between his legs and poking at her thigh. Keeking down sideways at his closed eyes and mindless expression she feels slightly jealous of how overwhelmed he is. It seems an ecstatic state. Senga cannot imagine herself overwhelmed by any boy or by anyone not superior to her. The only superior people she knows are a few film stars (mostly women) and her mother, a widow who has endured several emotional adventures without losing her composure, her efficiency, her very observant daughter’s friendship.

  But Tom’s hands, though still fearful of entering her blouse, are pressing her down toward the cold hard steps. She lightly slaps his cheek saying, “Time up lover boy.” He sighs and releases her, staring into her face with such wide-open tragic eyes that she chuckles and quickly kisses his mouth as a consolation prize.

  “Do you like me, Senga?” he pleads.

  “Of course! I’m crazy about boys. But it’s time you were hame with your mammy and daddy.”

  He continues staring, astonished by so much pain flowing from who a moment ago was his greatest source of delight. He once gloomily told the group that his parents influenced him too much. He now knows he is mocked for that. Senga decides to console him again. Slipping an arm round his arm she leads him briskly along the corridor to the door where he will get a last quick goodnight kiss, but tonight he refuses to be easily dismissed. He says awkwardly, “Senga, I got my prelim exam results today. I’ve failed my English. I won’t be able to see so much of you for a while. I’ll have to do more homework.”

  “Is that right?” she asks coolly.

  “I’ll see you twice a week,” he assures her.

  “I’ll like that fine … if I’m free.”

  This worries him. He says, “Senga, you won’t get fonder of someone else, will you, when I’m not around?”

  “How do I know? It depends on who turns up.”

  “It’s only three or four months to the exam, Senga! I can see you all the time after that.”

  “Aren’t you going to the university?”

  “Well?”

  “Don’t you have exams at the university? Won’t you have to study when you’re there?”

  Tom gapes at her. He cannot understand how he has missed seeing this obvious fact.

  “I like you Tom,” says Senga, “But I won’t spend five nights a week at home because you’re trying to be a doctor or something.”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor.”

  “Well, whatever it is. What’s wrong with you?”

  An idea has occurred to Tom, an idea so enormous that he is ecstatic with his eyes open. He grasps her hands and says, “Listen, will you marry me?”

  “What?”

  “Marry me! I love you, haven’t you noticed?”

  She stares hard at him. He plainly means it. She cries, “Oh Tom, you’re wonderful! You’re daft but you’re wonderful!” He lets her hands go and says with a touch of anger, “Yes or no?”

  “How can we get married?”

  “We need a room to ourselves,” he says, his mind working fast, “A rented room of course, a rented furnished room so first I need a job. And I’ve got qualifications! I’ve failed English but I’m fine in chemistry, maths and technical drawing. I’ll see the careers teacher tomorrow. It won’t be easy at first but at least we’ll be together with no damned parents putting pressure on us.”

  “But what will they say, your mum and dad?” asks Senga, whose mother puts no pressure on her, or none she has noticed.

  “It doesn’t matter what they say! If you lo … lo … (ach I hate that word, it sounds stupid) if you love me, Senga, I can do anything! So yes or no?”

  She is awestruck by her power over him and a bit awestruck by him too. She says, “Come here a minute.”

  She takes his head between her hands and gives him a kiss she learned a month ago from a boy who walked her home from a dancehall, a boy she won’t see again. It is a prolonged yet delicate kiss done with lips slightly apart and pouted forward as if talking French. Tom is pleased by it but more interested in what she will say when it ends. When it ends she has been most influenced by it.

  “How can I say yes?” she asks in a voice so full of longing and of approaching tears that he suddenly feels very strong and cries, “Don’t say yes. Don’t say a word yet. Give me a day to work out how to do it. And I’ll meet you tomorrow in the usual place at half-past six before the others arrive and I’ll tell you how we’re going to do it and then you’ll say yes – I know you will.”

  She weeps at this, laughing and shaking her head at the same time. He embraces and kisses her, feeling stronger than ever, and for a moment she is almost overwhelmed. her home after Sam leaves. Even so her mother, sitting before the television set, looks at her closely and says, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Who was tonight’s lucky lad?”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom again?” says her mother with a smile of friendly amusement. “Are you two getting entangled?”

  “It’s not as bad as that, Ma,” says Senga, and goes to her bedroom.

  Tom, elated, strides homeward through lamplit streets but grows depressed when halfway there. He used to like home more than most children like it. His parents were elderly, and treated him as one of themselves, and gave him all he wanted. He remembers happy evenings in the living-room, fitting together, sometimes with his father’s help, increasingly expensive and elaborate models of aeroplanes, painting each one afterward with great exactness. But since the age of ten he has discovered wants and emotions which have no room in his parents’ house. It, too, is in a building owned by the district council, but called a villa because it holds only four apartments, each with its own piece of a small surrounding garden. Most dwellers in villas feel more important than those in the tower-blocks and tenements. Tom’s parents feel this. His determined stride does not slacken as he nears the garden gate but (though he despises himself for it) he walks more softly on the tips of his toes. He knows that behind the orange-curtained living-room window his mother and father are quietly pretending to do different things while listening for sounds in the street, hoping every approaching footstep is his. Tom, like Senga, has had a door-key from an early age. He enters quietly and moves quietly toward his bedroom. Passing the living-room he hears his father say, “Come in here, Tom.”

  He sighs and enters.

  His father, a sturdy but not large man, sits with rolled-up shirt sleeves at the dining table, carefully copying receipts and invoices into an account book. Tom gets his height (not breadth) from his mother. She sits on the sofa knitting with quick nervous jerks which stop when her son enters. In this house nobody looks straight at each other. She says, “Where have you been, Tom?”

  “Seeing friends.”

  “That Senga, was it?”

  “What if it was?”

  “That is no way to speak to your mother, Tom,” says his father, still writing.

  “She’s not good enough for you, Tom,” says his mother plaintively, “And she’s far too young. People must be laughing at you.”

  “Well,” says Tom turning back to the door, “Goodnight.” “How are your studies going?” asks his father.

  “Not bad.”

  “Your English teacher thinks otherwise,” says his father, “He was in the shop this morning. He told me you’ve failed preliminary English.”

  “Since you know about it why ask me?”

  “Tom!” says his mother, shocked, “That is no way to speak to your father.”

  “Well I’d better go and study, eh? Goodnight,” says Tom, and turns to the door.

  “I’ll bring some cocoa and a biscuit in half an hour, Tom,” says his mother cajolingly.

  “Thanks a lot, Ma, but don’t bother,” sa
ys Tom quietly but distinctly, “I’m not hungry and not thirsty but thanks very much all the same.”

  He leaves the room with the bitter satisfaction of knowing his mother now feels what the mother of a noisier family would feel if her son seized her offerings of cocoa and biscuit and smashed them to the floor.

  Tom’s room would be a bleak one without the model aeroplanes which hang by threads from the ceiling. He shuts the door and sits on his bed, breathing deep because he wants to howl with rage. Instead he pulls a wallet from his pocket, removes a strip of small photographs taken in a coin-operated booth and stares at them. The first shows Senga’s naturally smiling face, the rest are more or less comic distortions of it. He gazes at these until he sighs with relief, relaxes and smiles back. A minute later he lays the photos on a table beside school books and walks up and down muttering, “The trouble with you two is you cannae enjoy life. You do nothing for fun, nothing for fun at all but watch TV or go to a show. You’ve no friends and you’re so damned snobbish you won’t even ask your relations in for a drink in case the neighbours think we’re low class or something. Well I’ve got friends, I’ve got a girl who likes me, I like her and …”

  His door is tapped and opened by his father who peers in grinning and says, “Talking to yourself again?”

  Tom looks back without speaking.

  Tom’s father is more relaxed with his son when his wife is not near. He enters, closes the door, sits on the bed and says, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course! You work all day at school and probably hard. No wonder you want some freedom in the evenings. Do I give you enough pocket money?”