Lanark: a life in 4 books (21 page)

He was less confident next morning and ate breakfast very quietly. Mrs. Thaw kissed him goodbye and said, “Don’t worry.
You’ll
knock his block off.”

She waved encouragingly as the car drove away.

That morning Thaw stood in a lonely corner of the playfield and waited fearfully for the approach of Coulter, who was playing football with friends. Rain started falling and gradually the pupils collected in a shelter at the end of the building. Thaw was last to enter. In an agony of dread he walked up to Coulter, stuck his tongue out at him and struck him on the shoulder. At once they started fighting as unskilfully as small boys always fight, with flailing arms and a tendency to kick each other’s ankles; then they grappled and fell. Thaw was beneath but Coulter’s nose flattened on his brow, the resulting blood smeared both equally, each thought it his own and, appalled by the suspected wound, rolled apart and stood up. After that, in spite of encouragement from their allies (Thaw was surprised to find a cheering mob of allies at his back) they were content to stand swearing at each other until Miss Ingram came up and took them to the headmaster. Mr. Macrae was a stout pig-coloured man. He said, “Right. What’s the cause of all this?”

Thaw started talking rapidly, his explanation punctuated by gulps and stutters, and only stopped when he found himself starting to sob. Coulter said nothing. Mr. Macrae took a leather tawse from his desk and said, “Hold your hands out.”

Each held his hand out and got a hellish stinging wallop on it. Mr. Macrae said, “Again!” “Again!” and “Again!” Then he said, “If I hear of you two fighting another time you’ll get the same treatment but more of it, a lot more of it. Go to your class.”

Each bent his head to hide his distorted face and went to the next room sucking a crippled hand. Miss Ingram didn’t ask them to do anything for the rest of the morning.

After the fight Thaw found playtimes more boring than frightening. He would stand in the lonely corner of the field with a boy called McLusky who didn’t play with the other boys because he was feebleminded. Thaw told long stories with himself as hero and McLusky helped him mime the actable bits. The vivid part of his life became imaginary. Thaw and his sister slept in adjacent rooms, and at night he told her stories through the doorway between, stories with the adventures and landscapes of books he had read by day. Sometimes he stopped and asked, “Are you asleep yet? Will I go on?” and Ruth answered, “No, Duncan, please go on,” but at last she would fall asleep. Next night she would say, “Go on with the story, Duncan.”

“All right. Where did I stop last night?”

“They … they had landed on Venus.”

“No, no. They had left Venus and gone to Mercury.”

“I … don’t remember that, Duncan.”

“Of course you don’t. Ye fell asleep. Well, I’m not going to tell
you
stories if you don’t want to listen.”

“But I couldnae help falling asleep, Duncan.”

“Then why didn’t ye tell me you were falling asleep instead of letting me go on talking to myself?”

After bullying her some more he would continue the story, for he spent a lot of time each day preparing it.

He bullied Ruth in other ways. She was forbidden to stott her ball indoors. He saw her do it once, and terrified her for weeks by threatening to tell their mother. One day Mrs. Thaw accused her children of stealing sugar from the livingroom sideboard. Both denied it. Later Ruth told him, “you stole that sugar.”

He said “yes. But if you tell Mum I said so I’ll call you a liar and she won’t know who to believe.” Ruth at once told their mother, Thaw called Ruth a liar, and Mrs. Thaw didn’t know who to believe.

During the first few weeks at school he had looked carefully among the girls for one to adventure with in his imagination, but they were all too obviously the same vulgar clay as himself. For almost a year he resigned himself to loving Miss Ingram, who was moderately attractive and whose authority gave her a sort of grandeur. Then one day when visiting the village store he saw a placard in the window advertising Amazon Adhesive Shoe Soles. It showed a blond girl in brief Greek armour with spear and shield and a helmet on her head. Above her were the words
BEAUTY PLUS STAMINA
, and her face had a plaintive loveliness which made Miss Ingram seem commonplace. During the dinner intervals Thaw walked to the store and looked at the girl for the length of time it took to count ten. He knew that by looking too hard and often even she might come to seem commonplace.

CHAPTER 14.

Ben Rua

Mr. Thaw wanted a keener intimacy with his son and liked open-air activities. There were fine mountains near the hostel, the nearest of them, Ben Rua, less than sixteen hundred feet high; he decided to take Thaw on some easy excursions and bought him stout climbing boots. Unluckily Thaw wanted to wear sandals.

“I like to move my toes,” he said.

“What are ye blethering about?”

“I don’t like shutting my feet in these hard solid leather cases. It makes them feel dead. I can’t bend my ankles.”

“But you arenae supposed to bend your ankles! It’s the easiest thing in the world to break an ankle if you slip in an awkward place. These boots are made especially to give the ankle support—once a single nail gets a grip it can uphold your ankle, your leg, your whole body even.”

“What I lose in firmness I’ll make up in quickness.”

“I see. I see. For a century mountaineers have gone up the

Alps and Himalayas and Grampians in nailed climbing boots. You might think they knew about climbing. Oh, no, Duncan Thaw knows better. They should have worn
sandals
.”

“What’s wrong for them might be right for me.”

“My God!” cried Mr. Thaw. “What’s this I’ve brought into the world? What did I do to deserve this? If we could only live by our own experience we would have no science, no civilization, no progress! Man has advanced by his capacity to learn from others, and these boots cost me four pounds eight.” “There would be no science and civilization and all that if everybody did things the way everybody else does,” said Thaw. The discussion continued until Mr. Thaw lost his temper and Thaw had hysterics and was given a cold bath. The climbing boots lay in a cupboard until Ruth was old enough to use them. Meanwhile Thaw was not taken climbing by his father.

One summer day Thaw walked briskly along the coast road until the hostel was hidden by a green headland. It was a sunny afternoon. A few clouds lay about the sky like shirts scattered on a blue floor. He left the road and ran down a slope toward the sea, his feet crashing almost to the ankles among pebbles and shells. He felt confident and resolute, for he had been reading a book called
The Young Naturalist
and meant to make notes of anything interesting. The shingle gave onto shelving rocks with boulders and pools among them. He squatted by a pool the size of a soup plate and peered in, frowning. Below the crystalline water lay three pebbles, a small anemone the colour of raw liver, a wisp of green weed and several winkles. The winkles were olive and dull purple, and he thought he saw a tendency for the pale ones to be at the edges of the pool and the dark ones in the middle. Taking out a notebook and pencil he drew a map on the blank first page, showing the position of the winkles; then he wrote the date on the opposite page and added after some thought the letters:

SELKNIW ELPRUP NI ECIDRA WOC

for he wished to hide his discoveries under a code until he was ready to publish. Then he pocketed the notebook and strolled onto a beach of smooth white sand lapped by the sparkling sea. Tired of being a naturalist he found a stick of driftwood and began engraving the plans of a castle on the firm surface. It was a very elaborate castle full of secret entrances, dungeons and torture chambers.

Someone behind him said, “What’s that supposed to be?” Thaw turned and saw Coulter. He gripped the stick tightly and muttered, “It’s some plans.”

Coulter walked round the plans saying, “What are they plans of?”

“Oh, they’re just plans.”

“Well, mibby you’re wise no’ to tell me what they’re plans of. For all you know I’m mibby a German spy.”

“
You
couldnae be a German spy.”

“Yes I could.”

“You’re just a boy!”

“But mibby the Germans have a secret chemical that stops folk growing so they look like boys though they’re mibby twenty or thirty, and mibby they’ve landed me here off a submarine and I’m just pretending to be an evacuee but all the time I’m spying on the hostel your dad is managing.”

Thaw stared at Coulter who stood with feet apart and hands in trouser pockets and stared back. Thaw said, “
Are
you a German spy?”

“Yes,” said Coulter.

His face was so expressionless that Thaw became convinced that he was a German spy. At the same time, without noticing it, he had stopped being afraid of Coulter. He said, “Well I’m a British spy,”

“You are not.”

“I am so.”

“Prove it.”

“Prove you’re a German spy.”

“I don’t want to. If I did you could get me arrested and hung.” Thaw could think of no answer to this. He was wondering how to make Coulter think he was a British spy when Coulter said, “Do you come from Glasgow?”

“Yes!”

“So do I.”

“What bit of Glasgow?”

“Garngad. What bit do you come from?”

“Riddrie.”

“Hm! Riddrie is quite near Garngad. They’re both on the canal.”

Coulter looked at the plans again and said, “Is it a plan of a den?”

“Well … a sort of den.”

“I know some smashing dens.”

“So do I!” said Thaw eagerly. “I’ve got a den inside a—”

“
I’ve
got a den that’s a real secret cave!” said Coulter triumphantly.

Thaw was impressed. After a suitable silence he said, “
My
den is inside a bush. It looks like an ordinary bush outside but it’s all hollow inside and it stands beside this road in the hostel so you can sit in it and watch these daft munition girls passing and they don’t know you’re there. The bother is”—truth made him reluctantly add—“it doesnae keep out the rain.”

“That’s the bother with dens,” said Coulter. “Either they’re secret and let in rain or they don’t let in rain and arenae secret. My cave keeps the rain out fine, but last time I went there the floor was all covered with dirty straw. I think the tinkers had been using it. But I could make a great den if I had somebody to help me.”

“How?”

“Will ye promise no’ to tell anyone?”

“Aye, sure.”

“It’s up a place near the hotel.”

They crossed the beach to the road and walked along it chatting amiably.

Before reaching the village they turned up a track which ascended to the tall iron gates and yew trees of the Kin-lochrua Hotel. Past this the track became a path half covered by bracken. It led them precariously higher and higher between boulders and bushes until Coulter halted and said triumphantly, “There!”

They were on the lip of a gully sloping down to the waters of the burn. It had been used as a rubbish dump and was half filled by an avalanche of tins, broken crockery, cinders and decaying cloth. Thaw looked at it with pleasure and said,

“Aye, there’s plenty of stuff here for a den.”

“Let’s get out the big cans first,” said Coulter.

They waded among the rubbish, collecting materials, then carried them to a flat place beneath two big rocks. They used petrol drums for the walls of the den and roofed it with linoleum laid across wooden spars. They were finishing by stuffing odd holes with sacking when Thaw heard a footstep and looked around. A shepherd was passing downhill waist deep in the bracken to their left. “Good afternoon, lads,” he said.

Thaw began working more and more slowly. Until then he had been chatting enthusiastically, now he became silent and answered questions as shortly as possible. At last Coulter threw down a piece of pipe he had been trying to make into a chimney and said, “What’s wrong with ye?”

“This den’s no use. It’s too near the path. Everybody can see it. It’s not secret at all.”

Coulter glared at Thaw then gripped the linoleum roof, wrenched it off and threw it down the gully.

“What are ye doing?” shouted Thaw.

“It’s no use! Ye said so yourself! I’m taking it down!”

Coulter pushed down the walls and kicked the drums into the gulley. Thaw watched sullenly until nothing was left but a few spars of wood and a distant clanking sound. He said, “Ye need-nae have done that. We might have camouflaged it with branches and stuff and hidden it that way.”

Coulter shoved through the bracken to the path and started walking down it. After a few yards he turned and shouted,“Ye bugger! Ye damned bugger!”

“Ye bloody damned bugger!” shouted Thaw.

“Ye
fuckin
’ bloody damned bugger!” yelled Coulter, and disappeared from sight among the trees. Brooding blackly on the den, which had been a good one, Thaw walked up the track in the opposite direction.

The glen had taken all the streams of the moor into its gorge where they tumbled and clattered among boulders, leaves and the songs of blackbirds, but Thaw paid little attention to the surroundings. His thoughts took on a pleasant flavour. Expressions of grimness, mockery and excitement crossed his face and sometimes he waved an arm imperiously. Once he said with a bleak smile, “I’m sorry, madam, but you fail to understand your position. You are my prisoner.”

It was a while before he noticed he had left the glen behind but there was an uneasiness in the quiet of the open moor which daydreams couldn’t shut out. The main sound was the water flowing clear and brown, golden brown where the sun caught it, along runnels which could have been bridged by a hand. In places the heather had knotted its twigs and roots across these and it was possible to follow their course by a melodious gurgling under the purple-green carpet which sloped and dipped upward to the humps and boulders of Ben Rua. Thaw suddenly saw himself as if from the sky, a small figure starting across the moor like a louse up a quilt. He stood still and gazed at the ben. On the grey-green tip of the summit he seemed just able to see a figure, a vertical white speck that moved and gestured, though the movement might have been caused by a flickering of warm air between the mountaintop and his eye. To Thaw the movement suggested a woman in a white dress waving and beckoning. He could even imagine her face: it was the face of the girl in the adhesive shoe-sole advertisement. This remote beckoning woman struck him with the force of a belief, though it was not quite a belief. He did not decide to climb the mountain, he thought, ‘I’ll follow this bit of stream,’ or, ‘I’ll go to the rock over there.’ And he would reach the top of a slope to find a higher one beyond and the ben looking nearer each time. Sometimes he climbed on a boulder and stood for minutes listening to small noises which might have been the distant scrape of a sheep’s hoof on a stone, or the scutter of a rabbit’s paw, or the fluttering of blood in his eardrum. From these pedestals the summit of Rua sometimes looked vacant, but later, with a pang, he would see on it the flickering white point. He advanced onto the mountain slope and the summit passed out of sight.