Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

by Gray, Alasdair

  “Oh no.”

  “I do not wish to deprive you of a bedroom wha you have slept fo nialy faw yias, Harriet, but by sleeping so close to me you exclude yawself from many pleasant romps and pyjama parties. Is tha nobody you would like to be nia? Nobody you would like to tap to through the wall if you felt lonely at night? Most of the gels would gladly be yaw chum if you allowed them an opening. Linda and you wa once so fond of each otha.”

  “Oh no.”

  “But if you neva communicate with othas how will you learn to communicate with yawself Harriet? I realize that yaw art is a way of doing that, but the highest art is made through intacoss with all humanity, Harriet. At least study yaw contemporaries in the relevant publications, Harriet.” Harry nods thoughtfully and the headmistress sighs. She knows that if she orders Harry to sleep in a room beside the others Harry will do so without complaint and revert to bed-wetting and peeing her knickers. The headmistress says, “I cannot let you stay lonely fo eva, Harriet. In a few weeks I will enrol three new little gels. On wet weekends they will play hia. If you awganize some games fo them, well and good. If you cannot do that, please stop them bullying each otha. If I learn that you fail to do even that I will lock this place up and you will return to pigging along with the otha gels in the sculpcha studio.”

  Harry prepares for the invasion by surrounding the bum garden with a wall of furniture, but also takes the headmistress’s advice and studies the work of her contemporaries in international art magazines. She finds that most of her work has so far been well within the modern Euro-American art tradition and that her recent tadpole figurines are distinctly avant-garde. The magazines also stimulate new ideas. When the little girls arrive she has a use for them. On rainy days they put on waterproof boots, coats and hoods and follow her on exciting expeditions to derelict farm and factories, disused railway sidings and old overgrown quarries. Harry strides in front wearing a knapsack holding sandwiches, thermos flask, a kit of spanners, hammer, hacksaw and electric torch. She carries a spade over her shoulder. One of her followers is allowed to carry a coil of rope, the other two a crowbar. They are in search of anything Harry regards as queer and interesting. They discover, dig up or dismantle into handleable sections boulders, knotted roots and branches, balks of timber, rusted implements and machinery. In shifting these to the loft Harry provides most of the physical leverage but the united ant-like force of the smaller girls has nearly equal traction power. Hjordis in her Fortress days ruled her people through bribes and terrorism. Harry is no democrat either but rules by example. She drives her people hard but herself hardest. They have no time to bully each other. They help Harry accumulate heaps of things which give her ideas for new sculpture.

  One evening after a strenuous excursion Harry is soaking in a warm bath when the headmistress enters. This she can easily do because the bathroom is between their bedrooms and has a door into each, a useful arrangement in years when Harry still needed prompting in the everyday uses of a lavatory. Ethel’s manner reminds Harry of these years so she has no sense of intrusion. A more intimate intrusion follows, but Harry’s formative experiences were all intrusions. When this one begins she feels she has waited a long time for it.

  The headmistress says, “I am going to teach you something enjoyable. I had hoped you would learn it from one of the otha gels, because it is most fun if learned from a chum of yaw own age or slightly olda. Still, a stale old loaf is betta than malnutrition. Half the madhouses in Britain are full of people who neva learned to do this propaly. Lie comfatably back while I pop this rubba cushion unda this bit of you. Part yaw legs a little. I am now very gently poking about fo a little spot which feels enjoyably tickly when gently stroked ... Have I found it?” After a while Harry says, “Mm.”

  “Does mm mean yes?”

  “Mm,” says Harry dreamily. She would not complain if the headmistress were much rougher,

  “In a few minutes I will stop doing this and you can continue doing it for yawself. You have a very nice body, Harriet, it is beginning to bloom. Yaw body will not only look nice, it will feel nice if you stroke it in otha places. Hia ... and hia ... hia also ... Do you eva think of things which make you tingle?”

  Harry frowns more deeply than usual.

  “Everybody, Harriet, has ideas which make them tingle, ideas which make stroking themselves and even stroking otha people moa fun. These ideas a to be found in litritcha, art, films, advertisements and the games we play. Some of these ideas would be harmful if taken seriously, but only stupid people take ideas seriously. The French – Germans – Russians – Irish sometimes take ideas seriously, but in England we a all liberals at heart, as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. We know that the wildest ideas a just ways of adding funny tingly feelings to a world managed by old-fashioned business methods, methods no serious person questions. Is this kind of talk boring you, Harriet?”

  “A bit.”

  “Then concentrate on yaw own tingly little dream world and let this talkative old lady stroke you a little longa fo I too am lonely sometimes. Sex is the root of it. Miss Harmenbeck has told you in biology how babies a made, but babies a expensive! Unless you want one the wisest sort of sex is little tingly stroking games with yawself or anotha gel. Do you eva think about boys – about men, Harriet?”

  “No.”

  “I neitha, but we should not despise, we should pity them. Naytcha created them to help women have babies, but they do that in less than a minute. By tha late teens they have passed tha sexual peak and it is downhill all the way fo them. They cannot enjoy sex as much as women, eitha. They stay fertile longa, but it does not console them. They turn jealous and destructive, hence wife-battering, wawfare and most of what is taught as history. Some truly great men try to refawm themselves but usually make a hash of it. Paw Tolstoy. But Leonard Woolf was all right. Leonard was a good old stick.”

  The daydreams which make Harry tingle are about Hjordis spanking people, but are unlike what happened in the shrubbery. That event was so unexpected and so quickly over that she hardly noticed it at the time. Gradually her imagination has falsified it into something splendid with Hjordis an enthroned witch-queen ordering the twins to spank Harry in terrible ways; sometimes ordering her to spank them back. These daydreams are not satisfactory. The voices sound wrong.

  Harry’s mother visits the school for the second time on the day her daughter finally leaves it. She asks, “So what has my daughta learned hia, apart from keeping clean and getting out of a sports car without showing ha knickas?”

  “She has learned what she wants to do with ha life. She will be a sculptress. She will achieve fame.”

  “Everybody’s daughtas a into art, or drama, or fashion nowadays,” says Harry’s mother carelessly, “I rather hoped you would make a nun of ha, as you almost promised me the last time we met. Will art be the only love of ha life? Will she be capable of a husband, kids, etcetera?”

  “No,” says the headmistress serenely, “She will neva be a family woman. She had no propa home life befoa you brought ha hia so I had nothing to build upon. The best I could do was help ha to self-respecting self-sufficiency. She will always be eccentric and lonely, but will not turn to drink, drugs or shoplifting.”

  “I’m glad you’ve straightened ha out a bit but I cannot feel grateful,” says Harry’s mother, “You’ve extracted a small fortune from ha fatha – thank God I manage my own money. Did she need ha own welding equipment? Ha own pneumatic drill and rivet gun? What use to ha wa lessons in glass blowing?”

  “Ha genius requiad them. True genius grasps in its teens the implements which mia talent acquias in its twenties. James Watt and Mozart a cases in point. Harriet will soon be very famous.”

  “Yes indeed!” says Harry’s mother bitterly, “Ha happy and glorious in-laws will ensure that. The prospect of a sale to a national collection is bound to bring dealas flocking.”

  The headmistress and Harry’s mother are both correct. In her first year at a great London art school
the staff find they can teach Harry nothing. In the second an international art dealer says, “Let me take you unda my wing.”

  Harry can build austere, grotesque or threatening forms out of fibreglass, cement, metal, wood, bricks, plastic and combinations of these. She can mould a five-foot-high tooth or big toe in clay and have it carved in granite or cast in brass or stainless steel. She can cover a floor with a lattice of rusty iron rods mysteriously reminiscent of fallen branches, or with a lattice of fallen branches mysteriously reminiscent of themselves. She can fill a room with suspended tubes and aluminium sheets which tinkle and thunder at the faintest human vibration. There is no shape or assembly of shapes she cannot create or represent, apart from a life-like head or torso. The only human forms she creates are sexless, featureless dummies hanging from real pieces of gymnasium equipment. The Tate Gallery buys one of these. She sells well in the USA too, though her entries in the Venice Biennale, her retrospective in the Pompidou Centre are ignored or disdained by Italian and French art critics. Her dealer says this is because the European mainland is so bloody insular. Harry shrugs. She really does not care what people think of her work. The excitement of imagining and making it, the satisfaction of setting it up somewhere are what she lives for. She likes it to be sold, because then she need not see it again. Anything returned to her is eventually broken up to make something else, so her dealer stores everything he thinks saleable and leaves the rest in her studio until it coheres in a marketable form. Harry’s indifference to her completed work, indifference to criticism, refusal to attend the openings of fashionable art shows including her own, make many intelligent folk think she too is intelligent. Only her old headmistress knows she cannot write more than her name without a lot of concentrated thought and a severe headache; that ordering a meal in a restaurant or making a snack in her studio are equally beyond her powers, though she handles dangerous industrial equipment with ease and safety. The married couple who feed her and buy for her, the secretary, accountant and dealer who handle her correspondence, money and work often tell each other, “The woman’s an idiot!” yet do not mean she is foolish. They are mocking, but also acknowledging, an intelligence they think greater than their own because it is alien.

  Since Harry is splendidly gaunt, related to royalty and makes weirdly fashionable objects she is photographed for glossy publications financed by art and property manipulators. Writers hired to embellish the photographs with amusing comments find the job difficult. It is hard to be entertaining about someone with no apparent sex life, social life or conversation. Judy’s publicity falls into four divisions –

  1 Her family connections.

  2 Her studios. (In London and San Francisco she has a vast skylit loft in a converted dockland warehouse, where she lives among her constructions and equipment. Next door to each is a small luxury flat for the married couple who look after her.)

  3 Her range of techniques. (This is best conveyed by camera. Harry welding, sand-blasting or casting something has been described as Wagnerian by Bernard Levin.)

  4 Theoretical twaddle about her place in the history of British art.

  “Aren’t you sick of being a Post-Modernist?” asks a man from the colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper. He is famous for his articles on artistic topics because he refers knowingly to famous foreigners in a way suggesting that no intelligent Briton need bother with them. He wants to annoy Harry into saying something interesting for an article to be called THE SHETLAND ENIGMA. Harry replies with a vague nod. He says, “Listen! The last truly great modern artists had reached maturity when you wa still a kid. They wa trained in a tradition which started with the Greeks, was revived by the Italians, was passed by Michelangelo to Rodin and brought to a conclusion by Moore, Hepworth, Frink, Brancusi etcetera. Do you neva envy these truly creative artists?”

  “No.”

  “But to most people nowadays the new things in the galleries look like doodling! They add very little beauty or intelligence to the places wha they appia, none at all to those who see them. Does it occur to you that yaw art may be a game played for nobody’s plesha but yaw own? Like doodling. Or mastabation.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it occur to you often, or only when yaw depressed?” Harry says slowly, “It occurred to me when you asked me about it.”

  “But it still strikes you as true?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Harvey about that.”

  Harvey is her dealer. He arranges all her interviews and censors the resulting articles. The journalist sighs and glances down at a list of questions unlikely to produce exciting answers, but better than nothing.

  “What was yaw first major commission?”

  “The bum garden.”

  “Eh?”

  Harry explains about the bum garden.

  “What became of it?”

  “It’s probly in the loft wha we left it.”

  “And could I ... could you ... could we go down with a photographa and have a look? This is impawtant! Really exciting! You say you wa seven when you made it?”

  He stares hard at a space inside his head where THE SHETLAND ENIGMA has been replaced by HARRY’S BUM GARDEN.

  The Georgian mansion near Bath is no longer a school, but on this warm mild May afternoon the former headmistress is delighted to take tea on the terrace with a photographer, a journalist and the most famous of her former pupils.

  “Who would have thought that a staunch old liberal like me would turn Tory in her declining yias?” she asks, gazing contentedly across the pupil-less lawn, “What strange alterations I have seen! When I was a little gel England ruled a quarta of the globe, Harriet. Only a bit of Eye-a-land had got away. The Em-pie-a now has all gone, all gone, except fo a little bit of Eye-a-land, yet the golden days of my childhood in the twenties and thirties have at last returned. I neva expected that. When I made a school of the dia old place in the forties I thought I would eventually have to grapple with daughtas of coal minas and powa loom weavas befoa hobbling down at last to the village post office to collect my old age pension. What a pessimist I was! Not that I resent my yias of service to the young. I think I did you a lot of good, Harriet. I wish I had taught Hjordis the same self-sufficiency, but I dared not attempt it. She would have blabbed.”

  “How is Hjordis?”

  “Dead. Dia me, how shocked you look! I thought everyone knew that, she hit the headlines fo six and no mistake. She was addicted to men, and popula ones – the most dangerous kind of man. She married a popula young brutalist stock-broka, then a student politician with terrorist connections, then popula singas who excited themselves by eating dangerous chemicals. Hjordis ate them too and died in 1978. The twins also came to a sad end. They returned to tha people in New Zealand, one got married and the otha tried to kill ha. Fortunately they a friends again, but confined to an institution. They send me Christmas cards. And Linda writes to me. Afta two bad marriages and a publicity job and an arts degree she now lives in Glasgow. She and a few otha heroic souls a toiling to make the place suitable fo ... something. She and ha ilk, most of them English, work fo ... money of course, but also fo the good of the community. Linda is a very, very special sort of social worka: an exhibition offica, or fine arts advie-za, or arts administrata, or all three. And she has two lovely little gels in Dartington Hall, which is not quite as liberal a school as mine was but a lot cheapa. I’m surprised Linda has not contacted you, Harriet. She must still hold you in awe.”

  “Could we er –?” asks the journalist, looking at his wristwatch.

  “Off you go. Harriet will escawt you to ha old haunt. You will see a difference Harriet. No jumble now to distract the eye from the starkness of yaw formations! In the seventies I perceived that the family lumba was steadily gaining value, Harriet, so I waited till I retie-ad and had it auctioned by Sotheby’s. The Victoria and Albert Museum wanted the old clothes, three museums of childhood was afta the toys, but I had written to forma pupils in the States asking if they knew American collectas w
ho might be interested. Indeed they did! A Yank took the lot, even the furnitcha and knick-knacks. I laughed and laughed and laughed. And a terribly dull pictcha I had loathed since childhood turned out to be by Corot. I do not owe my present affluence wholly to Mrs Thatcha’s tax reliefs.”

  The photographer takes one look at the loft and quickly makes a phone call. Two hours later a big van arrives bringing a theatre electrician and lighting equipment. Another hour is needed to position the lights accurately; then the photographer scrambles about on the rafter beams until he achieves a wide-angle downward shot of Harry squatting cross-legged and pensive in the midst of two hundred and thirty-four bums. Each bum casts a distinct shadow on the bare planks of the floor. So does Harry, but her upturned face, hopelessly resigned to an ancient and terrible wrong, is the small tragic centre of the composition. This picture is given a double page spread in the centre of the supplement. Part appears on the cover with the title HARRY’S BUM GARDEN.

  Two days later someone at the far end of a telephone wire says, “Guess who this is.”

  “Linda,” says Harry.

  “Yaw amazing Harry! Fancy you remembering my voice straight off like that afta nialy twenty yias! Listen, tha’s so much I want to say to you and ask of you ... I’m so afraid of getting emotional and being a dreadful boa ... Can you put up with me fo foa or five minutes maybe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well first, congrats on the splendid coverage the Sunday Times gave you. I nialy fainted when I saw the dia old bum garden all ova the supplement. I’m in Scotland, Harry. I know yaw too unworldly to have television or read the newspapas but shoe-aly you’ve heard that Glasgow will be the European cultcha capital for 1990?”

  “No.”

  “Well it is! So a lot of us have come hia to make the thing possible and take the curse off the place. Many intelligent people still think Glasgow is a bolshie slum full of drunks who slash each otha with ray-zas because nobody wants the ships they used to build. Well we a taking the curse off the place. Wia employing Saatchi and Saatchi! Yes, the firm that handles public relations fo Margaret Thatcha and the Conservative Party! How can we fail? We’ve also discovad a magnificent old neglected Victorian art gallery in the middle of Sauchiehall Street. The town council have owned it fo a century so nothing has apiad in it but local stuff, so now it’s being splendidly renovated and wia arranging a programme of shows with a truly intanational appeal. This morning thea was a big committee meeting, and yaw name came up, and because of the Times thing even our pet councilla knew you wa Britain’s most famous sculpta and a distant cousin of the thingmis. I was very cunning – I said not a word until they started to discuss Can we get ha? and at last one of them turned and asked (as they all have to eventually) What do you think? and I said very quietly, She and I a quite good friends. We wa at school togetha. In fact I put the finishing touches to most of these smalla bums. My dia, you should have seen tha faces! My standing soared like a fast lift up the Telecom towa! So they’ve asked me to beg and imploa you to let them bring the bums to Glasgow. We want to give you a whacking great retrospective hia, much bigga than the one in that ghastly Pompidou Centa (the French a so insula). Imagine this lovely curving white marble staircase, a double staircase with black marble balustas. It brings you to a vestibule whose floa is checkad marble with the bum garden spread all ova it! What otha artist has had a retrospective which starts with an installation of nialy three hundred pieces she conceived when she was seven?” “Hjordis conceived it,” says Harry and notices tears on her cheeks. Perhaps her breathing betrays this because Linda begins talking in a voice both vibrant and solemn.