Lanark: a life in 4 books (27 page)

Thaw explained about the key, expecting it would send Coulter into a fit of annoyance, as most of his less practical concepts did. Coulter frowned and said, “Has this key to be words?”

“What else could it be?”

“When I was staying with auld MacTaggart in Kinlochrua during the war I remember two or three nights when I got a good view of the stars. Ye can always see more stars when you’re in the country, especially if there’s a nip of frost in the air, and these nights the sky was just hotching with stars. I felt this … this coming nearer and nearer me till I almost had it, but when I tried tae think what it was, it had gone. And this happened more than once.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What sort of thing was it? Did it tie up everything you believed? Could ye test things with it?”

“You could test nothing with it. It was a feeling, I suppose. It was gentle, and permanent, and more like a friend than anything else.”

Thaw was unable to think of a similar experience and felt envious. He said, “It sounds a bit sentimental. Did you only feel it when you were seeing stars?”

“That was the only time.”

Thaw looked at the sky. Though at first sight it was merely dark his eyes gradually resolved it into brownish-purple, turning dull orange on the horizon toward the city centre. Thaw said, “Why is it that colour?”

“I suppose it’s the electric light reflected back from the gas and soot in the air.”

They reached a point halfway between their homes and said goodbye. After Thaw had gone forward a few yards by himself he heard a cry from behind. He turned and saw Coulter wave and shout, “Don’t worry! Don’t worry! Tae hell with Kate Caldwell!”

Thaw walked onward with a small perfect image of Kate Caldwell smiling and beckoning inside him. Such a fog of desperate emotions was wrapped round it that at last he had to halt and gasp for breath. On the far bank of the canal stood the vast sheds of the Blochairn ironworks. Dull bangs and clangs came from these, an orange glare flickered on the sky above them, the canal water bubbled blackly and wisps of steam waltzed on the surface and flew in a cloud over the towpath. A high railing divided the path from the Alexandra park. Taking a great breath he rushed at this, gripped two spikes on top, pulled himself up and jumped down onto the golf course. He ran along the fairways feeling exalted and criminal and came to a place where trees grew from smooth turf around the pagoda of an ornamental fountain. The grey lawns with dim galaxies of daisies on them, the silhouettes of the trees and fountain, were excitingly unlike themselves as he had seen them on the way from school a few hours before. Stepping over a “Keep Off the Grass” sign he went to a tree he had often wished to climb. It had no branches for the first twelve feet but it was craggy and crooked and he climbed high into it before the impetus which had driven him over the railing ran out and left him astride a high bough with his arms round the trunk. He recalled Greek stories about female spirits who lived inside trees. It was possible to imagine that the trunk between his arms contained the body of a woman. He hugged it, pressed his face against it and whispered, “I’m here. I’m here. Will you come out?” He imagined the woman’s body pressing the other side of the bark, her lips wrestling to meet his lips, but he felt nothing but roughness so he let go and climbed higher until the branches swung under his feet. Overhead the purple-brown sky had been pricked by a star or two. He tried to feel something gentle, permanent and friendly in them until he felt absurd, then climbed down and went home.

Mrs. Thaw opened the door to him. She said, “Duncan, how did you get in that mess?”

“What mess?”

“Your face is pot black, pot black all over!”

He went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His face was smeared with sooty grime, especially round the mouth.

CHAPTER 18.

Nature

The manageress of the Kinlochrua Hotel was a friend of Mrs. Thaw and invited her children north for the summer holidays. They boarded a bus one morning in a garage on the Broomielaw and it took them through shadows of warehouses and tenements into bright sunlight on the broad, tree-lined Great Western Road. They hurled past Victorian terraces and gardens and hotels, past merchants’ villas and municipal housing schemes into a region which (though open to the sky) could not be called country. New factories stood among tracts of weed and thistle, pylons grouped on hillsides and wire fences protected rows of grassy domes joined by metal tubes. The Clyde on their left widened to a firth, the central channel marked by buoys and tiny lighthouses. A long oil tanker moved procession-ally seaward between tugboats and was passed by a cargo ship going the other way. The hills on the right got steeper and nearer, the road was pinched between the river and a wooded crag, then they saw ahead of them the great rock of Dumbarton upholding the ancient fort above the roofs of the town. The bus turned north up the Vale of Leven, sometimes travelling between fields and sometimes through the crooked streets of industrial villages, then it reached the broad glittering water of Loch Lomond and ran along the western shore. Islands lay with trees, fields and cottages on them like broken-off pieces of the surrounding land, and on the far side arose the great head and shoulders of Ben Lomond. Fields gave way to heather and the islands grew small and rocky. The Loch became a corridor of water between high-sided bens, with the road twisting through trees and boulders at the feet of them.

The bus was full of folk going north for the holidays. Climbers sat at the back singing bawdy mountaineering songs and Thaw pressed his brow to the cool window and felt desperate. On leaving home he had taken a grain of effedrine and boarded the bus feeling fairly well, but beyond Dumbarton his breathing worsened and now he tried to forget it by concentrating on the ache the vibrating glass made in the bones of his skull. In the passing land outside the colours were raw green or dead grey: grey road, crags and tree trunks, green leaves, grass, bracken and heather. His eyes were sick of dead grey and raw green. The yellow or purple spots of occasional roadside flowers shrieked like tiny discords in an orchestra where every instrument played over and over again the same two notes. Ruth said, “Feeling cheesed off, brother mine?”

“A bit. It’s getting worse.”

“Cheer up! You’ll be fine when we arrive.”

“It’s not easy.”

“Ach, you’re too pessimistic. I’m sure you wouldnae get so bad if you were less pessimistic.”

The bus stopped on a hillside in Glencoe to let climbers off and the passengers were told they could stretch their legs for five minutes. Thaw got laboriously out and sat on a sun-warmed bank of turf at the roadside. Ruth stood with climbers taking their rucksacks from the boot and talked to someone she had met when climbing with her father. The other passengers gossiped and glanced at the surrounding peaks with expressions of satisfaction or puzzled resentment. An elderly man said to his neighbour, “Aye, a remarkable vista, a remarkable vista.”

“You’re right. If these stones could talk they would tell us some stories, eh? I bet they could tell us some stories.”

“Aye, from scenes like these Auld Scotia’s grandeur springs.” Thaw looked upward and saw huge chunks of raw material hacked about by time and weather. From cracks in the highest a rocky rubble spilled over heathery slopes like stuff poured down slag-bings. A boy and girl in shorts and climbing boots strode past him down the road, the boy with a small rucksack bumping between his shoulders. The climbers by the bus cheered and whistled after them: they joined hands and grinned without embarrassment. The assurance of the boy, the ordinary beauty of the girl, the happy ease of both struck a pang of rage and envy into Thaw which almost made him choke. He glared at a granite slab on the turf beside him. It carried patches of lichen the shape, colour and thickness of scabs he had scratched from his thigh the night before. He imagined the lichen’s microscopic roots poking into imperceptible pores in what seemed a solid surface, making them wider and deeper. ‘A disease of the rock,’ he thought, ‘A disease of matter like the rest of us.’

Back in the bus Ruth said, “That was Harry Logan and Sheila. They’re going to do the Buchail and spend the night in Cameron’s bothy. I wouldnae mind being Sheila for today. Not for tonight, but for today.” She laughed and said, “Are you very bad, Duncan? Why not take another pill?”

“I’ve done that.”

Ten minutes later he knew the asthma had grown too strong for pills and he began fighting it with his only other weapon. Withdrawing to the centre of his mind he recalled images from bookshop windows and American comics: a nearly naked blonde smiling as if her body was a joke she wanted to share, a cowering dishevelled girl with eyes and mouth apprehensively open, a big-breasted woman with legs astride and hands on hips and a sullen selfish stare which seemed to invite the most selfish kind of assault. His penis stiffened and he breathed easily. He fixed on the last of these women and her face became the face of big June Haig. He imagined meeting her in the precipitous waste landscapes through which the bus was rushing. She wore white shorts and shirt but high-heeled shoes instead of climbing boots, and he raped her at great length with complicated mental and physical humiliations. To stop these thoughts from coming to a climax of masturbation he sometimes wrenched his mind from them and sat amazed that thought could make such strong bodily changes. As his penis shrank the asthma got hard and heavy in chest and throat; then his mind gripped the image of the woman once more and a tingling chemical excitement spread again through his blood, widening all its channels and swelling the penis below and the air passages above. And behind it all suffocation waited like an unfulfilled threat.

The bus stopped in a street of uninteresting houses on the shore of a loch. Thaw and Ruth got out and found their mother’s friend awaiting them in a car. Ruth sat in front beside her. She was a small lady with a tight mouth and an abrupt way with the gear lever. Thaw, dumb with sexual broodings, sat in the back seat hardly listening to the conversation.

“Is Mary still working in that drapery?”

“Yes, Miss Maclaglan.”

“A pity. A pity your father can’t get a better job. Won’t these open-air organizations he does so much for
pay
him anything?”

“I don’t think so. He only works for them in his spare time.”

“Hm. Well, I hope you’re very helpful to your mother around the house. She isn’t at all well, you know.”

Ruth and Thaw gazed out of the window in embarrassment. The road undulated in slanting sunlight over a great boggy moor with small irregular lochans in the folds of it. The summit of a conical peak arose beyond the curve of the moor’s horizon, and Thaw saw, with distaste, it was Ben Rua. To keep sexually excited he had been forced to imagine increasingly perverse things and now whatever in the outer world recalled other experiences upset him by its irrelevance. They came to the height of the moor and descended toward an arm of the sea with Kinlochrua on the other side, a strip of cottage-flecked lands beneath a grey and grey-green mountain. The tide was out and the clear shallow brine, reflecting blue sky over yellow sands, made a colour like emeralds. A sudden muffled clattering hurt their eardrums. Miss Maclaglan said, “They’re testing something at the munition factory. Let’s hope it isn’t atomic.” “Wasn’t the munition factory shut down when the war stopped?” said Ruth.

“Yes, it was shut for almost a year; then the Admiralty took it over. They’ve taken over the hostel too but they haven’t opened it yet, more’s the pity. The hostel was the best thing that ever happened here, it shook up their ideas a bit. Kinlochrua was dead before and it’s been dead since. Do you know that Mary Thaw is the only real friend I’ve made in the place? How can you be friendly with women who’re afraid to knit on Sundays because of what the minister will say? What has nosey old McPhedron to do with their knitting? Your brother isn’t too well, is he?”

Ruth turned and gave Thaw a glance which meant, Pull yourself together. She said, “He’s having one of his wheezy spells, but he’s got pills for it.”

“Well, I think he should go straight to bed the moment we get to the hotel.”

At the hotel Miss Maclaglan showed him upstairs to a small clean flower-patterned bedroom. He undressed slowly, removing a shoe and staring for ten minutes through the window, postponing from moment to moment the effort of removing the next. Outside lay a mossy ill-kept garden hidden by a wing of the building from the well-kept gardens in front. It was hemmed in by dark green cypresses and pines. Small paths and hedges were arranged round a square half-stagnant pond with a broken sundial in the middle. The whole place fascinated him with a sense of sluggish malignant life. The hedges were half withered by the grasses pushing up among them; the grasses grew lank and unhealthy in the shadows of the hedges. With more fibrous limbs than the millipede has legs various plants struggled in the poor soil, fighting with blind deliberation to suffocate or strangle each other. Between the roots moved insects, maggots and tiny crustaceans: jointed things with stings and pincers, soft pursy things with hard voracious mouths, hard-backed leggy things with multiple eyes and feelers, all gnawing holes and laying eggs and squirting poisons in the plants and each other. In the corruption of the garden he sensed something friendly to his own malign fantasies. Convulsively, he wrenched off the other shoe, undressed and got into bed. Miss Maclaglan brought in a hot-water bottle and asked if he would like anything to read. He said no, he had his own books. Ruth brought up a meal on a tray. He ate, then lay and masturbated. Ten minutes later he masturbated again. After that he had no weapons to use against the asthma at all.

The garden behind the hotel was overlooked by a dusty porch containing a massive table and some chairs too worn for use inside. Next day he sat there with books and painting tools. Breathing heavily, he made pencil drawings, emphasized the best ones with India ink and tinted the result with watercolours. While he worked the asthma came to bother him less, and as he had hardly slept the night before he shut his eyes, leaned over the table and rested his brow upon clenched fists. He could hear the air lightly stirring the branches of the trees, the infrequent call of a bird and a wasp buzzing in the corner of the porch, but he listened most intently to a murmuring in his own head, a vague remote sound like the conversation of two people in an adjacent room. One speaker was excited and raised his voice so much above the steady drone of the other that Thaw almost heard the words: “… ferns and grass what’s wonderful about grass …”