One night I was later than usual in the building and heard someone enter from the lane. That did not worry me because only members of The Smug had keys, but I was surprised when Sanker opened my office door. He paused, obviously surprised by the sight of me, though I was delighted by the sight of him. For years I had never had a chance to tell him what was going wrong with us, and now the chance was here! For maybe a whole minute he listened then in a wonderful, condescending tone interrupted with, “What you should do, Mistress Maisie, is see more of Shon McGeeky. If you acquired some of Shon’s élan you would be a much happier woman. Goodnight Mistress Maisie.”
With wide open mouth and eyes I stared at his back as he left the office, then realised why he had come. It was he who had been furtively destroying invoices that would let me quickly pay what the firm owed. I was now working for a collusion of liars. I did not run after Sanker and resign my job then and there, because I had served the firm for twenty-five years – my whole working life – and could not imagine doing anything else.
Three days later, on Friday at half past four, a heavy cardboard box was carried in by the basement foreman and dumped on the floor by my desk. It held books flung in mixter-maxter, like a heap of bricks. I said, “Where’s the trolley?”
He said, “How should I know? That ****ing works manager took every trolley away in a van ten minutes ago.”
“Why?”
“For some ****ing reason that is not my business. My job is just to go on working in ****ing impossible conditions,” he said and left before I could ask him to place the box on a table. Instead of asking for help I tried to lift it alone. A sudden dreadful pain made me drop it and fall on top, unable to move or feel anything but pain. Assistants sent for an ambulance that took me to hospital, and I slept after an injection that made cessation of pain the loveliest thing in the universe. Henry was at the bedside when I wakened, holding my hand and looking so afraid I grew terrified. Then a doctor arrived who told us not to worry – I had burst a disc in my spine, and for a few days would be practically paralyzed, but would completely recover if I lay still in bed for a couple of months, or perhaps three or four. Recovery would be complete if I never again tried to lift big weights without assistance. There was no reason to expect complications.
“Bed sores?” asked Henry, and was told I need not stay so still that those developed. Hating hospitals I asked when I could get home. The doctor said, “Probably the day after tomorrow, if you have someone dependable to nurse you.”
“She has,” said Henry.
That ended my last day with the firm, which survived my departure by not much more than a year. I doubt if Sanker or McGeeky tried to visit me in hospital, and I have since only seen them in bad dreams. Some correspondence must have ensured the pension due me so Henry must have seen to my side.
Our bedroom and bathroom had been upstairs so he bought and put into the kitchen (luckily a big room) a hospital bed with mattress that could be raised or lowered by pressing a switch. Each night before joining me in it he gave me a bed-bath which I enjoyed, for his handling was so gentle that even relieving myself in a bed-pan became pleasant. It was reassuring to have him working near me in the house or garden all day and I needed reassurance. The relief of freedom from an impossible job was mixed with rage that my whole working life had ended in wasted time. Nightmares in which I still grappled with McGeeky and The Smug bothered even my waking hours. Henry placed the TV set where I could see it but now what I saw on it enraged me. Presenters, newscasters and celebrities all seemed versions of The Smug or women they promoted for flattering them. To end my nightmares of the whole world being ruled by Sanker and his parasites Henry finally got rid of the set and I began reading the novels of Agatha Christie. She had written so many that at last I found myself halfway through one I had read a fortnight earlier. I switched to the less repetitive thrillers of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Louise Welsh, finally gorging on the anodyne novels of Alexander McCall Smith, who seemed able to write them faster than I could read. But the only really good times were after dinner when Henry, after spending half an hour with a computer in our old bedroom, sat beside me pondering over magazines with such names as The Allotment Holder.
Noticing one night that he hardly ever smiled in his old sly way, I asked, “Are you tired of the T.L.S. and The March of the Mind?”
Again he jerked as if wakened from a dream and said, “Not exactly. I was thinking about shit. Ours, and where it went.”
“Do you mean sewage?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I know where it goes?”
“Everybody should. Do you remember sewage farms? Big open circular tanks with sprinklers revolving above? I haven’t seen one for years. They used to supply farmers with manure. Farmers nowadays use artificial fertilisers, a bad idea. When you started using the bed-pan I fitted a chantie into the lavatory pan so none of ours is wasted.” “You are spreading our shit in the garden? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I cried.
“I knew you would need time to get used to that wise and ancient practice,” he said soothingly. “Chinese and Italian peasants have been doing it for thousands of years.”
“Haven’t the neighbours complained about our stinky garden?”
“Have you ever smelled it?” he asked, and I did not answer. On sunny days when he wheeled my bed out onto the patio I had smelled nothing odd. However, I promised that when fit to walk upstairs I would remove his chantie and shit straight into my own flush lavatory pan.
“A pity,” he said musingly, then added in a voice that seemed to be quoting: “Soil should be dunged and dunged and dunged until it is the colour of my trousers.”He had recently given up blue jeans for black corduroys. This was a conversation I neither could nor wished to continue, but he wanted to and said, “You enjoy the meals I make but don’t seem to notice they are vegetarian. With a bit more land I could make us self-supporting in the way of food.”
“Henry,” I told him, “I am still not well, and don’t think I will ever be well enough to discuss expensive new notions.”
On that day he said no more.
I have never liked large breakfasts. Each day began with Henry bringing a cup of tea and saucer of fruit cut into thin little slices and arranged in patterns that became more and more fancy. “Why waste time making it fancy?” I asked. “Just tip the stuff onto the plate and I’ll enjoy it just as much.”
“I like making patterns and thought they would please you,” he said.
“They don’t. They’re unnecessary – a waste of your time.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’ll stop making them.”
“Good!” said I.
But next morning the fruit was arranged as fancy as ever. I stared at him. In a miserable voice he said, “I couldn’t stop doing it. I tipped what you call the stuff onto the plate and the result affronted my sense of decency. I had to make a pattern of it.”
“You did it to please yourself, not me!”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but why let it bother you? Why resent patterns you destroy as soon as you start eating them? I expect you to destroy them. I want you to.”
“I hate them because they show you are acting like a fool! Like a, like a, like a … like an artist!” I concluded, glad to have found the right word.
“O no!” he said, shocked, then added thoughtfully after a pause, “You’re right. As a chef and gardener, yes, I am becoming an artist. Luckily. I used to be very miserable most of the time.”
Hardly believing my ears I wept and wept and wept. He embraced me, said he was sorry, swore that before becoming a househusband he had never thought our marriage miserable because like me he thought it was normal, but now he had useful things to do and saw the past differently. He ended by saying with a touch of disgust, “I used to be completely selfish.”
“Nonsense!” I cried. “You were the most unselfish man I ever met.”
“You’re wrong. I tried to be kind to everyone but apart from that I jus
t hung about feeling superior to them. I had no initiative.”
“You think being unkind to me shows initiative?”
“I am not unkind! I am only telling the truth! And it is you who changed me! And I am grateful! Can you not see how much better we both are and be glad?”
“I am still very sick,” I said, weeping, “ and I wish you had stayed as you were.”
He stared at me, then began trembling and shaking his head from side to side, then jumped up yelling, “This is impossible! You are making me impossible! Can I not be allowed to love you AND domestic economy?”
With clenched fists he began punching his head from side to side as hard as he could. In our four years together he had never raised his voice or acted madly. I screamed at him to stop, tried leaving the bed to stop him. He stopped at once, joined me in bed and we wept together. I promised I was sorry for having made a stupid fuss about the fruit breakfast, he said he was sorry for explaining things tactlessly. We became lovers and friends again. That was our first and worst quarrel and probably our last. I knew he would never be unfaithful to me, but I still worried about the future.
A week later he started talking as if in the middle of an argument with a beginning I had missed: “You see, the county of Fife was once a separate Scottish kingdom. Some Fifers have noticed it could be made economically self-supporting. So could Orkney. And Shetland. So could Aberdeenshire, if the farmers stopped turning fertile earth into beef for export by passing grass through cattle. Kitchen gardens are the most productive and sustainable way of turning soil into food. Factory farming is the worst way.”
“Henry, I am not arguing with you,” I said, but he continued vehemently as if I was: “I am all for Scottish independence but if people and governments keep depending on the Global Bosses’ Federation things will go on getting worse.”
“What is the Global Bosses’ Federation?” I asked, exasperated.
“It prefers to be called the World Trade Organization. It rules the strongest nations and is out to grab all the resources of smaller ones. That is why Britain and the U.S.A. keep shooting and bombing folk in Islamic countries and why an Islamic clique destroyed the New York World Trade Centre. Global bosses don’t need a single centre now, so their opponents are plotting to attack stock exchanges. A stupid idea. The bosses are financially insured against every kind of damage, and the plots only strengthen global armies and police forces they control. Global bosses can only be fought by taking Voltaire’s advice at the end of Candide.”
“Henry!” I cried, horrified. “Don’t go into politics!”
“I will not, except at the grassroots level. Grass is an essential crop and should be properly cultivated, as I have been trying to explain.”
After many of such complicated lectures full of irrelevant details I realised he wanted to start a vegetarian restaurant on land cultivated to supply it. I said I would never leave the home I loved and whose mortgage I had paid off years before meeting him.
“You will not need to leave it,” he said. “When your health recovers I can commute.”
“To Fife?” I yelled. He said he wanted to buy a patch of land within or near the Glasgow boundaries, perhaps one of those sharp triangles of ground that nobody wants because they are between intersecting motorways or railway lines. Before Old Kilpatrick there was a neglected strip of ground between the railway and the Clyde from which oil tanks had been removed. The ground was probably polluted so would be cheaper to buy or lease, and making it fertile by right cultivation would set a splendid example.
“What a crazy notion,” I said. “But in the mouth of such a completely impractical man it should not surprise me.” “Why am I impractical?” said he. “What have I ever done that I did not do well?”
“You may have done things well but you’ve never been paid for them,” I said.
“I had nothing better to do than tidy that basement,” he said sternly, “and if I have not drawn a wage for being your househusband I have been sufficiently paid by your love.”
It was hard not to laugh at that but I said, “But Henry you’ll need a lot of money for a scheme like this, you’ve never handled any and you’re getting none of mine.”
“I neither want or need yours,” said he, “and you are wrong to say I have not handled money. I have handled it by saving what I earned as a teacher, added to what my parents left.”
I knew that was quite a lot. His parents, like mine, had been very thrifty in the twenty years of full employment after the second World War when the British working classes were better paid for their labour than before or since. He went on to say that through the Internet he had contacted folk interested in his scheme and willing to put money into it – architects, lawyers, civil servants, even a banker, all keen on gardening, all knowing that if our governments continued ignoring the Kyoto Protocol our children would either starve or be nourished by plankton from Scottish sea lochs, if not worms grown in bottles.
“We have no children!” I told him.
“Stop being selfish.”
“Are you really planning to set up a commune?” I demanded. “They never work. They were tried in the 1960s and hardly outlasted them.”
“Certainly not a commune. I am starting my own company and will be in charge of it at every level.”
“If people invest in it your company will be a limited liability one – you will be a capitalist! Your investors will expect return for their money, shares of the profits.”
“The return for their share, like ours, will be food or good meals.”
“And how will I fit into this world-saving scheme? Remember the state of my back. I will never grub up weeds in your organic kitchen garden or chop onions in your kitchen.”
“Clerical help will be needed when we get under way.” Once again I almost laughed aloud, seeing for the first time after four married years that Henry has no sense of humour and that mine, though a quiet one, would be needed in times to come.
My back has healed as the doctor foretold. Once again I flush my bodily wastes into the public sewage system, and have started applying for jobs in libraries and bookshops. All my applications have so far failed because I am (as they say) “over-qualified”. My best chance of a job seems to be behind a supermarket counter and I have almost resigned myself to that. Henry’s plan to reform the world by setting it a good example is not yet under way. He still runs what he calls “our domestic economy” perfectly, while spending more time on the Internet investigating land acquisition. He also talks to teachers and officials about his self-sustaining garden-restaurant giving work experience to local school children, though the locality is not yet decided. He works so hard over details of his scheme that sometimes I think it may work. If not, Henry will remain nothing but my dependable househusband. I do not know which outcome I most fear.
GUMBLER’S SHEAF
AND,” SAYS HARRY GUMBLER. His secretary types that then waits for some minutes until he says, “Delete that Sarah. No! Do not type delete that, delete And. I can dictate nothing more intelligent today so we’ll tackle something else.”
From a filing cabinet he removes a folder labelled NOT URGENT and from the folder takes a sheaf of letters. After gloomily examining the first he dictates the following.
“Provisioning Visa
Customer Experience Manager
Dear Mr Carter,
How dare you compliment me – a man you have never met – because your company’s advertising campaign has chosen me to receive a card which will guarantee me no interest on any purchases I make for the next three months. Why should I or anyone expect interest on anything they buy in a shop?… Can you explain why, Sarah?”
His secretary explains that many people without money use credit cards as a means of payment. Gumbler groans and says, “Delete the last two sentences, replace by: Why should I or anyone not desperately poor be tempted by an offer which is nothing but a bait designed to lure me into getting indebted to Barclay’s Bank? A bait disguised as
a compliment! Were I not professionally articulate your impertinent arrogance would reduce me to inarticulate rage. You should be ashamed of yourself. Yours truly etcetera. Now the next.
“Excelsior Promotions
Youth Encouragement Agency
Dear Egragio Heron,
I refuse to fill in and return your impertinent questionnaire, but will have the courtesy to explain why. Your pompous letter heading does not tell me if your organisation is a publishing house, a branch of a government education department, or a Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation (QUANGO for short) which is a hybrid of two or all three of these. But your purpose is clearly stated: you are asking celebrities to explain the reasons for their success in a survey whose results will be used to encourage school children in their efforts to succeed in life. Let me ask you some questions.
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 78