Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

by Gray, Alasdair

  “Mm,” says Harry, and walks in.

  Most of the market is in arched vaults under a disused railway viaduct, each vault lined with trestle tables spread with what seems the salvage of rubbish dumps. Everything still usable or wearable was of the worst quality when new and has since passed through several owners; everything once good-looking is hideously damaged. Yet a stream of people seem interested in buying. The queerest sights, however, are not in the vaults but on the cobbles of the lane outside. A woman with a twisted smile on her newly bruised face squats over a spreading pool of urine. Is she really trying to sell the last year’s calendar, rusty forks and baby’s plastic rattle on the stones before her? Is that barefoot man with the head of a broken-nosed, slack-lipped Einstein really trying to sell the cracked shoes in his hands?

  “Hawf deid flooers tenpence!” screams someone, blocking Harry’s vision with a huge bunch of half dead flowers, “Split the stalks, pit them in waater wi an asprin an thull revive! Thull revive!”

  Harry giggles and walks on. Linda at Harry’s elbow mutters vehemently, “I hate this. Hate it. I am not a socialist, but these people should not be allowed to flaunt themselves in this way. They should be put somewha wha we can’t see them. The city plannas will pull this place down eventually, oh God make it soon!”

  “I like it,” murmurs Harry drowsily, “I think these people have as much right to exist as you or me. I will come hia often.”

  The lane ends in a small doorway. They go through it towards a car park and the glass and aluminium ziggurat of a vast shopping mall.

  “It’s easy fo you to be cold-blooded: yaw an aristocrat,” says Linda sharply, “My daddy topped the hit parade in 1963, so I’m working class by breeding and bourgeois by education. Some sights I just cannot stomach.”

  “Has Glasgow an agency which will supply domestic servants?” asks Harry, still speaking drowsily.

  “Probably. Why do you ask? Do you find the faithful Hopcrafts inadequate?”

  “No, but I may need a lady’s maid.”

  “A lady’s maid?”

  Linda stares at Harry who is dressed, as usual, in crumpled army combat trousers, shirt, tunic and boots. Several women of Harry’s class sometimes wear neatly laundered forms of such clothes nowadays, but Harry has always dressed this way because it suits her work. With the addition of a machine-gun and facial hair she would look like a mercenary soldier in a tropical campaign.

  “My motha had a lady’s maid,” murmurs Harry absentmindedly, “Throughout the Second World Waw, when everybody else’s lady’s maids went to work in munition factories, my motha somehow contrived to keep her lady’s maid.”

  Harry finds an employment agency and pays it to send her applicants for the post of lady’s maid. Each evening after work she waits for them in her flat, tingling with a hopefulness which dies when Mr or Mrs Hopcraft admits the applicant to her sitting room. Most are so alarmed by her appearance that they can only look at her sideways. She murmurs, “What can you do fo me?” and after they’ve told her says, “Well, I may be in touch.”

  That means no. Those who act more suitably have the wrong sort of voice because they are English (she forgot to tell the agency she didn’t want that sort) or because they are Scots whose accents have an English sound. After a fortnight a small full-bodied woman is shown in who looks at Harry with a curiosity which is neither challenging or amused. Harry says, “I need a maid. What can you do fo me?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” says Senga, “What do you want me to do? I’m good at hair – I’m a trained hairdresser – but you don’t have any hair. So what do you want?” Harry sighs with relief because this woman is exactly right. “I want anything you want,” Harry starts to say, but changes it to, “I want can I give you a drink?”

  “Aye. Yes. Sure. I’ll take anything but kicks and slaps. I’ve had too many of those.”

  Harry opens a well-stocked drinks cabinet: one installed by Linda and the Hopcrafts for the entertainment of her dealer and his associates. Harry last tasted alcohol when she was seventeen, hated it and has since drunk nothing but lemonade and orange juice – even coffee and tea disgust her. She stares at the bafflingly labelled bottles and at last says, “I hate to be awkward but will you poa it for yawself? I’m hopeless at most things.”

  Senga, frowning thoughtfully, nods quickly several times, pours herself a large bacardi and soda and asks, “What will you have?”

  “The same,” says Harry automatically. Senga hands her a nearly full cut-glass tumbler and says, “Since we’re drinking together could we mibby sit down?”

  They sit primly at opposite ends of a long sofa. Senga says, “Cheers.”

  Harry sips her drink like an obedient child taking medicine. It tastes less poisonous than she expects. I am growing up! she thinks. Happy tinglings in her body make her so passively content that when Senga says cheerily, “Now then, out with it! What do you want me for?” Harry cannot answer.

  So Senga asks once more. Speaking at first with difficulty but growing more fluent Harry says, “When I was tiny I was always dressed by somebody else. They got very cross if I did not sit very still in my nice frocks and be very good all the time. But you see I wanted to be wicked. And now I cannot CAN NOT buy nice beautiful clothes or care a damn how I look. I order hard-wearing useful clothes from illustrated catalogues and fling them on anyhow so I look like something the cat dragged in, usually. A fright. A tramp. But I had this very nia friend once,” says Harry, laying down her glass and rocking her body forward and back, “I had this close friend who sometimes got very strange lovely clothes made fo me. I didn’t always want to put them on because she enjoyed how I looked moa than I did, but when I submitted (and I always submitted, nobody was ever strong enough to disobey Hjordis) when I submitted and dressed up and did as she wanted – not how I wanted – I was entie-ally happy. Entie-ally happy, in those days, sometimes. But she died long ago and now I’ve nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Please. Help. Me.”

  Forgetting that the Hjordis she has lost is imaginary Harry clasps her hands behind her head, drags it down between her knees and in that position wails as loudly as she can, which is not very loud. Senga puts her own glass down, goes behind the sofa and gently and firmly massages Harry’s neck and shoulders, saying, “Don’t worry. Calm down. Everything’s going to be fine. You’ve found your wee Scotch auntie so your troubles are at an end.”

  After a while Harry comes to feel so safe and calm that they are able to talk about arrangements, though Senga suggests most of them.

  “You don’t need a living-in maid,” she points out, “You work most of the day and don’t wear special togs for that. I’m just a pal you want to relax with sometimes, a pal who’ll overhaul your wardrobe and dress you up special for special occasions, or just for fun. I don’t think the people who feed and clean up for you need know very much about us two. Now, I’ve a small business which doesnae pay very well. I make clothes for people, working from the house. What I need is a wee workshop, a room where you can see me when you need something or just want to relax a bit. The initial financial outlay need be nothing great, and well worth it in the long run.

  I’m full of ideas.”

  DAD’S STORY

  IF a man is middle-aged between thirty-five years and fifty-five I have been old for several years. When I stopped being young I did not expect life to go so quickly but I have no other complaint. I will likely take twenty or thirty more years to die and it will be the smooth comfortable dying of someone protected by money. My ceiling admits no rain so I enjoy the movement of clouds over the rooftops. Every weather, every season has its unique beauty and this large window allows a good view of it. My flat is at the top of a building on a hill so I see right across the roofs of the other tenements and terraces. A tree-filled groove zigzagging among their roofs shows the course of a small river. This flows into a fine park in the middle distance, a park between two hills. One is crowned by the pinnacles of our mock-gothic university, one b
y the towers of an old theological college converted into luxury flats where my friend Leo lives. I see all this distinctly, and much of the city beyond, and on a clear day many fields and tree clumps on the hills beyond that. I am in the west end where most of the prosperous residential districts are in cities where the wind usually blows from the west. Even so, smoke from the east and other industrial districts so stained our finest buildings that a few years ago they made a very poor impression on visitors. Since the industries closed the richest districts have been extensively cleaned, partly with public money and partly through tax concessions to property owners. We now advertise our city as a splendid one and a lot of foreigners are buying places in the posh parts. I am lucky to have moved here from the east (where I was born and educated) before the prices went up. Like all poor parts of Britain the east end has got poorer in the last twenty years and will be poorer still when the poll tax is in full working order.

  My job is making folk laugh, but I started my working life in that great ancient profession which never escapes from its education. My school qualified me for a university which qualified me for a college which qualified me for a school, but as a teacher. Many teachers marry each other. I was never sexually attracted by my kind, but used to like their company. My social life after four o’clock on weekdays was going to Brown’s tearooms in Sauchiehall Street and sitting round a table with colleagues of the same age. For the first half hour we never spoke. Our voices were hoarse, our brains wasted by seven hours of deliberately depressing children of the ignorant working-class. (Our school served a poor district. Had it served a prosperous one we would have been equally shattered by seven hours of pushing middle-class children up to the level of their happy parents. Irony.) Slowly our brains would recover and words start to enter these silent conversations, then light badinage, gossip and facetious social and political commentary, all excellent training for me. I listened more than I talked. Professional humorists are never at the centre of happy groups, talking briskly and keeping everyone cheerful. We stay on the edge, listening carefully and trying to think of something better to say. And when we think of it we say it too late, or in the wrong tone of voice, so others don’t hear it, or ask us to repeat it, and when we do there is a definite pause. The others may smile, but it can take them as much as a minute to start the conversation going again.

  One or two who sat with us in the tearoom had gone into the Scottish BBC instead of the ordinary education system. One day the talk turned to religious prejudice and someone remarked that, despite the fact that our city had a very large Catholic population – certainly as many practising Catholics as there were church-going Presbyterians – there were many anti-Catholic slogans scribbled in the lavatories and on walls, but nobody could remember an anti-Protestant one. I suggested it was easier to write Fuck the Pope than Fuck the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Someone chuckled and the conversation turned to other things. But a fortnight after I heard my joke on a Scottish Home Service comedy show. Fuck had been replaced by To hell with, because it was illegal to say fuck on the wireless then but the joke was essentially mine. One of our BBC friends had passed it on to a professional mouthpiece. After that I stopped saying witticisms aloud. I saved them up, wrote them down and posted them to Jimmy Logan, Stanley Baxter, Rikki Fulton, Lex Maclean and Johnny Victory. Yes, all these immortals have owed the laughs they pulled to me. Not to me only. I know four other humorists in this city whose jokes are far more brilliant than anything I’ve written. I don’t envy them. Though brilliant they are erratic, and professional comics need predictable streams of second-rate jokes more than brilliant gags that stop the show. Which is why I earn enough by my jokes to have left the teaching profession, and these brilliant boys have not; but I am too intelligent to feel smug.

  For I am not a satisfactory man. I drink when not thirsty and hardly ever climb to the top of a high hill, though I used to enjoy reaching the top of hills and felt better, slept better when I came down. No wonder I am flabby in body and mind. My jokes are not radical criticism, they confirm what most of us feel: that black, brown, yellow people, the Irish and all foreigners, drunk men, the working classes, very fashionable folk, highly educated folk, all clergymen, homosexuals, wives and attractive women are essentially daft. Which may seem fair enough, but I never make fun of royalty, financial institutions, the police, higher clergy and politicians. Most professional comics won’t buy jokes against these people. I do nothing about how my city and nation is governed, except occasionally vote for a party too small to change them. In the Athenian sense of the word I am an idiot. The old Athenians invented that word for people who take no effective hand in making the laws which control them. Let’s drop the topic, it embarrasses me. I will describe exactly what happened last night with enough fanciful changes and additions to make the description interesting and believable. I met a woman who calls me Dad (though I am nobody’s dad) and it felt like a turning point.

  But that was not the first thing to happen. The first thing was feeling happy all day because Donalda was happy at breakfast-time. We had made love a few hours earlier, so, “I don’t need you tonight,” she said on a note of cheerful self-mockery. “Tonight you can do what you like.”

  I was careful not to look pleased as that would alarm her, but I was very pleased, though I said “I’ll probably play chess with Q. And maybe I’ll call on you afterwards, but of course I’ll phone first.”

  This was a dangerous thing to say. If I failed to phone she might tell me later that she’d been unable to sleep for half the night. It would be no defence for me to say, “I did not promise to phone you, I said I might phone you. I said it to make you feel safer, and out of gratitude. I was grateful to you for saying I could do what I liked.”

  Why does Donalda seem like my jailor sometimes? Donalda is not a jailor, not a harsh schoolteacher. She is gentle. When busy and happy she has a shining quality, that quality of bright directness most people lose with childhood. Her lips do not shut in the firm line of those who want to control people. When working with her hands (she is a dressmaker) her lips stay slightly apart in a small, expectant smile. She has an emotional age of twelve or thirteen. This does not annoy me because my own emotional age is about that. Donalda shouts when angry, weeps when miserable, tells people when she is happy. But the longer I know her the less she turns her shining qualities on me, or perhaps the less I notice them. Nowadays most of her words seem to say now nasty and unsuitable I am. Certainly I drink too much. Why does she not get rid of me like other women who once loved me? I am good at being rejected. I don’t rave, plead or quarrel, I stay polite and friendly. I am hurt enough for the rejecters to know they have shut me out of something wonderful and precious, not so hurt they need feel guilty about it. Why is Donalda FAITHFUL to me? I never expected faithfulness, or asked for it, or promised it. When we first dined together she told me she wasn’t that sort at all. Which reminds me of the dream I had the first time we slept together. My book had just been published.

  My book was published and I got very depressed. A few years earlier Punch had published a funny wee story of mine. That had made me ambitious. I wanted to be as famous as Q, so I started writing a whole book of funny stories. Unluckily I have only one basic joke. Conan Doyle, O’Henry and Thurber were like that, but my joke is about sex which makes it painfully obvious. I carefully set each story in a different time and place with characters whose voices, faces and jobs were different too. I hoped this would fool readers into thinking the joke was also different, and that readers who weren’t fooled would read on to see how I disguised it next time.

  Well, I sent the book to a London publishing firm and six months later it was returned with a letter saying they regretted not returning it sooner, since publication of it would reflect no credit whatsoever on themselves or on me.

  That shattered me. Nine months passed before I was strong enough to post it to another London publishing firm, nine more before I had the courage t
o phone and ask if they liked it. A man said to me, “Haven’t you heard yet? Yes, we’re doing your book. I’m no judge of humour myself but two of our readers think you hit a contemporary nerve.”

  I lived in dread and anxiety another six months because I feared that when my book appeared nobody would laugh at it. I needn’t have worried. The Times Literary Supplement called me “a major name in British humour” and only the Sunday Post complained about the sex. For a whole fortnight reviews appeared in periodicals which notice such things. For a fortnight every critic in Britain seemed to find my book as funny as I did, and then, suddenly, silence! They stopped laughing at it and went on reviewing books by other authors as calmly and approvingly as if I had never published a word. I realized that before they noticed me again I would have to get ANOTHER book written and published, and I am not a demonically industrious writer of the Enid Blyton, Iris Murdoch and Dickens sort. I enjoy writing, I forget myself when doing it as much as Leo forgot himself when driving a fast car, but unlike Leo I am easily distracted.

  Anyway, I felt like a husband whose wife, after a deliriously happy honeymoon, elopes with a lot of other men. I got drunk and dimly remember a big gallery with paintings on whitewashed brick walls, a crowd which chattered and sipped wine with its backs to the paintings, a small, plump attractive girl with very black hair who seemed amused when I picked her up and whirled her about a bit. I don’t often act so daft. A month later I met her at a party when I was sober and saw lines on her face which showed she was nearly forty. She still looked girlish. That deep anxiety all adults feel was half-hidden in her by unusual willingness to be pleased. When I asked her out for a meal she said, “Aye. Sure. Great, but don’t tell anybody. If Senga finds out she’ll murder me. Senga hates men.”