He looks obstinately away from her.
“Did you want to stick your hands in them like THIS?” she giggles, putting her hands in her pockets. “Did you want to fumble about in them like THIS?”
“No more dirty talk!” orders a very tall thin youth emerging from the bushes, “How dare you molest this young lady with your obscene and suggestive insinuations?”
“ME molest HER? Ha!” cries the man and lies back flat on the grass with hands clasped behind head. He thinks it wise to look as relaxed and unchallenging as possible for he is now greatly outnumbered. Beside the tall youth is a smaller, stouter youth who looks far more menacing because his face is expressionless, his head completely bald, and beside him stands Sharon saying scornfully, “Big pockets with buttoned flaps!”
“You should have left us alone a bit longer,” grumbles Davida. “He was starting to enjoy himself.”
“He was starting to enjoy his antisocial fetishistic propensities with a lassie young enough to be his granddaughter!” cries the tall youth fiercely.
“Molesting two lassies in fifteen minutes!” says Sharon. “We’ve witnesses to prove it.
He’s got to pay us for that.”
The man says, “I’ve paid you already.”
“That … is not an attitude … I would advocate if you want to stay in one piece.” says the tall boy slowly taking from a big pocket in his trousers a knife with a long blade. The smaller, more dangerous-looking youth says, “Hullo, Mr McCorquodale.”
The man sits up to see him better and asks, “How’s the family, Shon?”
“Dad isnae out yet,” says the shorter boy, “but Sheila’s doing well in TV rentals. She went to Australia.”
“Yes Sheila was the smartest of you. I advised her to emigrate.”
“I KNEW he was a teacher,” says Davida smugly.
“You stupid fucking cretin!” the tall boy yells at the shorter one, “If you’d kept out the way we could have rolled him for all he’s got, buggered off and nothing would have happened! We don’t live round here, we’ve no police record, nobody could have found us! But now he knows you we’ll have to evade identification by cutting off his head and hands and burying them miles away!”
He saws the air wildly with the knife. The girls’ faces express disgust. The smaller youth says mildly, “Don’t do that to old Corky, he wasnae one of the worst.”
“Not one of the worst?” cries the ex-teacher jumping to his feet with surprising agility, “Did I not make my gym a living hell for you and your brothers? I also advise YOU,” he tells the taller youth, “to put that knife away. You obviously don’t know how to handle it.”
“And you do?” says the tall boy sarcastically.
“Yes, son, I do. I served five years in the army before I took to teaching. Your combat training is all from television and video games. I have learned armed AND unarmed combat from professional killers paid by the British government. Davida. Sharon. Shon. Persuade your friend to pocket that bread knife. Tell him he’s a fine big fellow but I’m stronger than I look and if he’s really interested in dirty fighting I can show him some tricks that’ll have the eyes popping out of his head. Tell him I gave Sharon nearly all the money I carry so if he needs more he’ll have to come home with me.”
And McCorquodale smiles rather wistfully at the tall youth’s combat trousers.
AIBLINS
LONG AGO a college of further education paid me to help folk write poems, stories and other things that bring nobody a steady wage. I had applied for the job because I was in debt and needed a steady wage. The college also provided an office, desk, two chairs and flow of hopeful writers who met me one at a time. I must have talked to nearly a hundred of them while the job lasted but can now only remember:
(1) A shy housewife writing a novel about being the mistress of a South American dictator.
(2) An engineering lecturer writing a TV comedy about lecturers in a college of further education.
(3) Two teenage girls, unknown to each other, who wrote passionate verses against the evils of abortion.
(4) A dauntingly erudite medical student writing a dissertation proving, by Marxist dialectic, that Rimsky Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel was a better forecast of mankind’s political future than Wagner’s Ring.
(5) The twelve-year-old daughter of Chinese restaurateurs who, led in by an older sister or perhaps mother or aunt, gravely handed me a sheaf of papers with a narrow column of small neat writing down the middle of each, writing that tersely described such horribly possible events that I feared they were cries for help, though of course I treated them as fiction.
(6) And Ian Gentle.
Ian was a thin student whose manner suggested he found life a desperate but comical game he was bound to lose. He gave me a page of prose telling how raindrops slide down leaves and stems, then join between grass blades in trickles that gradually fill hollows in the ground making them pools, pools steadily enlarging until they too join and turn fields into lakes. Without emotional adverbs and adjectives, without surprising metaphors, similes or dramatic punctuation, Gentle’s ordinary words made a natural event seem rare and lovely. My new job had not yet taught me caution. I looked across the desk, waved the page of prose at him and said, “If I had written this I would strongly suspect myself of genius.”
He smiled slyly and asked, “Can I sell it?”
“No. Too short. If you made it part of a story with the rest equally good Chapman might print it but Scottish magazines pay very little. Even in England the best literary magazines pay less for a story than a shop assistant’s weekly wage. But this is a beautiful description, perfect in itself. Write more of them.”
He shrugged hopelessly and said, “I can’t. You see I was inspired when I wrote that.”
“What inspired you?”
“Something I heard by accident. I switched on the radio one night and heard this bloke, Peter Redgrove, spouting his poetry, very weird stuff. I’m not usually fond of poetry but this was different. There was a lot of water in what he recited and I’m fond of grey days with the rain falling steadily like I often saw it on my granny’s farm when I was a wee boy. I suddenly wanted to write like Peter Redgrove, not describing water behaving weirdly but water doing the sort of things I used to notice and like.” “If a short burst of good poetry has this effect on you then expose yourself to more. There are several books of Redgrove’s poetry. Read all of them, then read MacCaig, Yeats, Frost, Carlos Williams, Auden, Hardy, Owens —”
“Why bother?”
“You might enjoy them.”
“But what would it lead to?”
“If they inspired you to write more prose of this quality … and if you persisted with your writing, and got some of it into magazines … eventually, at the age of forty, you could end up sitting behind a desk like me talking to somebody like you.”
He giggled, apologised and asked if nobody in Scotland earned a living by writing. I told him that a few writers of historical romance, crime fiction, science fiction and love stories earned the equivalent of a teacher’s income by writing a new novel every year or two.
“Thanks,” said Gentle standing up to leave, “I don’t think I’ll bother. But if it’s genius you want read Luke Aiblins’s stuff.
It’s as weird as Redgrove’s.”
“Is he a student here?”
“In a way, yes, but then again, in another way, not really.”
“Tell him to show me his work.”
“I will, but he’s hard to pin down.”
In the college refectory a week or so later a sociology lecturer walked over to me looking so grimly defiant that I feared I had offended her. She placed a slim folder with a bright tartan cover on the table beside my plate and said, “Read these poems. I typed them but they’re written by Luke Aiblins, a truly remarkable student of mine.”
“I hear he’s a genius.”
“He is, but needs guidance. Can I make an appointment for him?”
We
made an appointment. She said, “I think I can ensure that he keeps it though it won’t be easy. He’s very hard to pin down.”
She left. I glanced through the poems and saw they were beautifully spaced and typed. The first was titled PROEM. I read it with interest, re-read it with astonishment and a third time with pleasure. I then knew it by heart.
Bone caged, blood clagged,
nerve netted here I sit,
bee in stone honeycomb
or beast in pit or flea in bin,
pinned down, penned in,
unable to die or fly or be
any one thing but me,
a hypochondriac heart
chilled by the spittle of toads that croak
on the moon’s cryptic hemisphere.
But yet, loft-haunter, tunnel-groper,
interloper among men,
I am the Titan & my pen
wet with blue ink or black
alone can tell them what they thought
and think and give them back
the theme, scheme, dream whose head
they broke, & left for dead.
Crown, King, Divinity: all shall be mine
to take, twine, make into a masterpiece
of fine thread, strong line.
Yes, let me write my life
ten volumes in one book
of good and bad friends, women who will
and will not walk with me,
the warped, harmonious, happy, sick & dead.
While I have eyes to look, so let it be. Amen.
All his other poems were equally resounding. I was now keen to meet him and quite unable to imagine him.
He kept the appointment and was a dazzlingly beautiful boy of eighteen or nineteen. His brown eyes and head of neatly curling brown hair harmonised perfectly with brown sweater and faun slacks. Relaxation and eagerness don’t usually blend but in him they did. He entered with the happy air of someone who has all the love he wants while looking forward to more; entered silently, sat down, folded his arms and leaned toward me with an enquiring tilt of the head and encouraging smile. Beauty in people makes me want to stare with my mouth open. In men it almost strikes me as indecent, yet I felt a pang of envy that I quelled by turning my chair a little so that I looked past, not at him. As I cleared my throat to make an opening remark Aiblins said, “Excuse the question: why don’t you look straight at me?”
“I look straight at hardly anyone in case they think me rude. I suppose I’m afraid of most people but I’m not afraid of their writings. I like yours very much. You know that the rhymes of words inside a line matter as much as rhymes at the end. You know that the rhythms of lines in a verse can vary. You enjoy playing with the sounds of words and you make them entertaining for the reader.”
“Right,” said Aiblins, smiling and nodding.
“You have also learned from some very abstruse poets, Donne and Hopkins. Am I correct?”
“Eh?” said Aiblins.
“Have you read John Donne and Gerald Manley Hopkins?”
“No. Wait a minute. Yes. I once dipped into them but my work is original. I hear it inside this.”
Aiblins tapped the side of his head with a finger.
“Never mind, Leavis says inspiration is often unconscious reminiscence. Now, creative writing teachers usually, and wisely, urge young writers to use the plainest, commonest words because many of the profoundest and loveliest and funniest ideas have been put into plain words. To be or not to be, that is the question. I wish I were where Helen lies. So you despise me, Mr Gigadibs.” “No,” said Aiblins reassuringly.
“I was quoting Browning. Now these well-meaning instructors forget that the same great wordsmiths very often relax or ascend into sonorous complexities: sharked up a list of lawless resolutes, and Eleälé to the asphaltic pool, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name, (and here I flatter you) a hypochondriac heart, chilled by the spittle of toads that croack on the moon’s cryptic hemisphere. That line of yours is absurdly pompous, grotesque, almost insane but!” (I started laughing) “It works! We are often depressed for reasons we don’t understand but feel are caused by something huge, vague and distant, something …” (I paused on the verge of saying weird, an Ian Gentle word) “… something uncanny that might as well be on the moon.”
Aiblins, who had looked puzzled for a moment, smiled then said “Right.”
“But I want to point out that these are the first poems of a very young writer, someone who is (please excuse the simile) like a bird flapping its wings to attract attention before launching into the air. You know that because it is your only theme. You should now—”
“Excuse me,” said Aiblins quietly yet firmly. “Are these my poems?”
He lifted the folder from the desk, glanced inside then laid it back, shaking his head, smiling and saying, “Yes, my poems dressed in tartan. Women are incredible. What can you do with them? You were saying?”
“The theme of all your poems is the great poet you are going to be. It is a prologue to your life’s work, a convincing prologue, but not enough.”
“Why not?”
“Take the first poem, the best, and the first verse, also the best: Bone caged, blood clagged, nerve netted et cetera. You are describing a state of confinement and frustration everyone has sometimes felt, poets and housewives and schoolchildren and ditch diggers and college lecturers. Right?”
“Hm. Maybe,” said Aiblins.
“Verse two. Loft-haunter, tunnel-groper, interloper et cetera. Here you state your feelings of being both above and below other people, being an outsider as we called ourselves in the sixties, so you’re still talking for a lot of people, especially young ambitious ones. Right?”
“You’re getting warm.”
“Then comes I am the Titan and my pen et cetera. You now declare yourself a masterful figure like Prometheus, someone who will help humanity recover something fine that it has spoiled and lost: innocence perhaps, faith, hope, love – only God knows what. So you are not now speaking for most folk, you are describing what only very confident priests, politicians, prosperious idealists, teachers, artists and writers sometimes feel, while speaking mainly for Luke Aiblins.” Aiblins smiled and nodded.
“Now look at verse three! Crown, King, Divinity, all shall be mine. What do these three words with initial capitals mean?”
“You tell me. You are the grand panjandrum, the salaried professor, the professional critic. I’m just a humble poet. You tell me my meaning.”
“I think they mean that you feel sublimely smug because of your verbal talent.”
“Do you think all my poems convey that?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Even the love poems?”
“Did you write any? Name one.”
“OUTING.”
Opening the folder I said “Let’s hear it!” and read aloud the following.
This sunken track through the rank weeds
of docken, nettle & convolvulus
does not belong to us: only to me
whose nostrils gladly drank the stink
of vegetable sweat,
whose ears sucked in
the sullen whimper of the gnat’s wing,
who gladly felt the wet sting of
smirr upon the cheek.
So do not talk, say no word to me
but walk in stillness on a path of moss,
a slope of trees upon our right hand side
and on our right the cluck & flow
of a wide stream.
I do not know what you see here.
I do not want to know.
For if each tries to see those things
the other sees
our probing eyes will shatter
the brittle matter of the other’s dream
so each of us will be
inside a toneless, tasteless, aimless world of mediocrity.
Walk in my dream and I will walk in yours
but do not try
to share our separate dreams.
Two dreams can touch, I think,
but there’s an end
of dreaming if we try to make them blend
for this can only be when both of us lie bare
and I have felt the ripeness of your flesh.
When bodies mix
then even dreams can melt.
“A love poem?” I asked, smiling.
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t give the faintest idea of the companion it addresses, not even her or his sex.”
“Shakespeare’s sonnets aren’t exactly portraits either.”
“True, but it’s clear the people he addresses are fascinating, and that he loves them. You tell your companion to shut up so that you can enjoy some very dull scenery, though at the end you seem to anticipate …”
I hesitated.
“Getting into her knickers?” suggested Aiblins.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Low marks for the start and the later poems. What about the last?”
“I’m glad you reminded me!” I said, greatly relieved, “At first it’s bathos didn’t impress me but now I think it is your best piece of verse – truly objective – not self-vaunting at all. You emerge here at last from the shell of your ego. Yes yes yes, here it is—”
A SPELL AGAINST ENVY
Rascals whose energy made history
had splendid banquets, buildings,
songs of praise
they never made. Digestion, rot and fires
undid their solid things. The finest hymns
cannot outlive the language of their choirs.
Only the joy of making things anew
outlive the owners & the makers too –
those fabricators, songsters, cooks who give
web, honeycomb, nest, burrow, beaver dam,
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 63