Lanark: a life in 4 books (35 page)

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“My father won’t let me …”

“My mother keeps saying …”

“Last week my mother …”

“Last year my father …”

He thought of entering the conversation by recalling fights with his mother but the details had grown dim; all he remembered was their inevitability. Molly Tierney sighed and said,

“I think I’ll become a nun.”

Thaw said, “I think I’ll become a lighthouse keeper.”

There was silence, and then someone asked why.

“So I’ll be able to walk in spirals.”

Molly giggled and Thaw leaned toward her. He criticized the theme of the monthly painting, quoting Blake and Shaw and describing shapes in the air with his hands. People raised objections and he quoted folk tales from many lands to show how fact and fancy, geography and legend were linked. Molly was clearly listening. She put her feet on the floor and leaned toward him saying, “You know a lot of fairy stories.”

“Yes. They used to be my favourite reading.”

“Mine too.” She chuckled huskily. “In fact they still are. I like Russian tales best. Have you noticed how many of them are about children?”

They talked of ugly and beautiful witches, enchanted mountains, magic gifts, monsters, princesses and lucky younger sons. With feelings of wonder and freedom he found she loved and remembered much that he loved himself. Suddenly she curled her legs back on the sofa and said to Macbeth, “Give me a cigarette, Jimmy.”

Macbeth rolled a cigarette and held a match to the tip while she inhaled it.

“And Jimmy, would you do me a favour? Please, Jimmy, a very special favour?”

“What is it?”

Her voice became a mixture of babyish and whorish. “Jimmy, it’s my architecture homework. This model cathedral we’ve to make. I’ve tried to make it but I can’t, I don’t know how to begin, it’s too complicated for my tiny mind and I’ve to hand it on Friday. Will you make it for me? I’ll pay for the materials, of course.”

No one else at the table looked at each other. A voice in Thaw’s head raved at Macbeth, “Spit in her face! Go on, spit in her face!”

Macbeth looked down at his cigarette with a faint smile and said, “All right.”

“Oh Jimmy, you’re a pet.”

Thaw got up and walked home. The sun had set. He felt cold and light-bodied and the streets semed to flow through him on a current of dark air. Clock dials glowed like fake moons on invisible towers. On Alexandra Parade by the Necropolis a drunk man lurched past muttering, “Useless.”

“Right,” said Thaw. “Useless.”

He woke often that night to find his legs grinding against each other and his fingernails tearing healthy parts of his skin. In the morning the sheets were bloodstained and his body felt so heavy he had trouble bringing it out of bed. At school he went through the routines like a sleepwalker. At noon he went to the refectory and drank a cup of black coffee at a crowded table. A girl nearby shouted, “Hullo Thaw!”

He smiled feebly.

“Enjoying yourself, Thaw?”

“Well enough.”

“You like the life here, do you, Thaw?”

“Well enough.”

A boy leaned against her laughing, and whispered in her ear. She said, “Thaw, this man is saying rude things about you.”

The boy said quickly, “No, I’m not.”

Thaw said flatly, “I’m sure you’re not.”

He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage. He got quickly out of the tearoom trying to see nothing but the floor he walked on.

At home he stood in the kitchen after the evening meal, sometimes putting dishes away but mostly standing stock-still, his face open-mouthed and aghast. Mr. Thaw entered and said impatiently, “Haven’t you finished yet? You’ve been here over an hour. Is my company so disagreeable that you can’t share a room with me?”

“No, but I’m thinking things I don’t like to think about and I can’t stop.”

“What son of things?”

“Diseases, mostly. Skin diseases and cancers and insects that live in people’s bodies. Some of them are real but I’ve been inventing new ones. I can’t stop.”

“For God’s sake do your homework or go for a walk. Do
something
, at any rate.”

“How can I, with my mind full of these things?”

“Then go to bed.”

“But when I shut my eyes I see them. They’re so active. They gnaw and gnaw. Surely this is how people go mad.”

Mr. Thaw stared at his son with mingled impatience and worry. “Will I call the doctor then?”

“How would that help? ‘Doctor Tannahill, I’m havingthoughts I don’t like to think!’ How would that help?”

“He might send you to a psychiatrist.”

“When? I’m thinking these things now.”

“But what makes you think them?”

“That’s easy. I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that. Frustration. If a man hath these two, honesty and intelligence, and hath not sex appeal, then he is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.”

“You’re talking hysterically.”

“Yes. That’s unlucky, isn’t it?”

“Get to bed, Duncan, and I’ll bring you a toddy.”

He sat in bed propped up with pillows to make sleep difficult. He invented a maggot called the Flealouse. It was white and featureless except on the underside, which was all mouths. It bred in connective tissues and moved by eating a trench in the surfaces it travelled among. It spread through bodies without upsetting them at first, for it sweated a juice which worked on the nerves like a drug, making diseased people plumper and rosier, more cheerful and active. Then it started feeding on the brain. The victims felt no less happy but their actions became mechanical and frenzied, their words repetitive and trite. Then the lice, whose movement so far had been sluggish and gradual, suddenly attacked the main bodily organs, growing hugely as they did so. Infected people turned white, collapsed in the street, swelled and burst like rotten sacks of rice, each grain of which was a squirming louse. Then the lice themselves split open releasing from their guts swarms of winged insects so tiny that they could enter anybody through pores in the skin. In less than a century the Flealouse infected and ate every other sort of life on the globe. The earth became nothing but rock under a heaving coat of lice of every size, from a few inches up to five hundred feet. Then they began to eat each other. In the end only one was left, a titan curled round the equator like a grub round a pebble. The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.

While elaborating this fantasy he fell asleep several times and continued it in dreams, sometimes being a victim of the Flealouse, sometimes a Flealouse himself. The dreams were so detailed that horror made him recoil into wakefulness and fix wide-open eyes on the electric light, hoping the pain of the dazzle would keep him conscious. Meanwhile pan of his mind tried to get free with the desperation of a rat roasting in a revolving cage.

“
Stop! Stop! Stop!
”

“You can’t.”

“
Why? Why? Why?
”

“Your mind is rotting. Minds without love always breed these worms.”

“
How can I get love?
”

“You can’t. You can’t.”

Something happened shortly after five in the morning. He was struggling against thoughts of the lice and against the sleep which made them seem solid when the image of Molly Tierney came like coolness to a heated brow. He lay down filling slowly with relief. He would go to her the next day and explain calmly, without pathos, that only she could stop him going mad. If she refused to love him what happened after that would be her responsibility, not his. And she might help. This was not a world of certainties but of likelihoods, so the glorious lovely accident must happen
sometimes
. The Flealouse vanished from his mind. He fell into a smooth, wholly dreamless sleep.

He woke as his father was drawing the curtains.

“How’s your mind this morning?”

“It’s all right now. It’s fine.”

“But will it last?”

“I think so.”

“And you don’t want a doctor?”

“Certainly not.”

“Good. Three weeks ago, Duncan, you told me you had been robbed of goods worth fifteen shillings. That was a lie. Now I want the truth.”

“The goods cost three pounds.”

“I know. I was looking in your pocket for handkerchiefs to wash when I found the invoice. I was shifting it to its proper place on the spike in the scullery when I noticed the true amount.”

Mr. Thaw went to the window and stood, hands in pockets, looking down the street. There was a small distinct frenzied sound in the room like a mouse gnawing wood or a steel nib scribbling on paper.

“For God’s sake stop scratching!” said Mr. Thaw. “Aren’t there enough bloodstains on the sheets?”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t understand why you had to lie about it, unless from a love of lying for its own sake. You could have hidden the truth just by keeping your mouth shut.”

“I came as near truth as I dared.”

“Dared? What were you afraid of? Did you think I’d thrash you?”

“I deserve to be thrashed.”

“But Duncan, I’ve not thrashed you since you were a wee boy!”

Thaw considered this and said, “True.”

“Furthermore, how could you keep hiding the right amount from me? Sooner or later I’d have had to pay the bill.”

“I’m paying that myself. I’ve already saved thirty-five shillings.” “Thirty-five shillings in three weeks! You’ve saved it out of food money. No wonder you’re sick. How can you expect to be well if you starve yourself?
How? How?
”

“Please don’t attack me.”

“What else can I do?” said Mr. Thaw piteously. “When you were wee you could be beaten, but you’re a man now. How else can I bring home your wrongdoing but by driving at you and driving at you with words?”

After a moment he added quietly, “I would be glad in future if you would trust me with the facts of your condition, however disastrous they may be.”

“I’ll try to.”

“Then get up for your breakfast, son.”

“I want to stay in bed. I feel feeble.”

His father stared at him then left the room saying, “I’ll bring your breakfast in.”

Thaw lay and remembered the night before. Asking for Molly Tierney’s love seemed foolish and unnecessary now, but the decision to do it had cured his fear of decay and disease. When such thoughts came in future he would entertain them calmly, and move on to other thoughts.

For two days his father, before going to work, brought him breakfast in bed. At noon Mrs. Colquhoun downstairs brought up a tray of dinner. Between meals his body basked in unhurried time: time to scribble in notebooks or read or lie thoughtfully dreaming. It was good to be free from the tensions of art school, yet the place haunted him. He had been part of the life of the students there, a voice among voices heard by attractive girls, a face among the faces surrounding them. He wrote:

From under loose sweaters and tight blouses their breasts threaten my independence like the nosecaps of atomic missiles. Cannibal queens carnivorous nightingales why should I feel my value depends on being valued by women, what makes them the bestowers of value? Oh I want to grip them somehow and show them the universe is bigger,
stranger, more sombre, colourful and distinct than they know. And how can I do this in a picture called “Washing Day” with a minimum of three figures? Yah what grandeur can be shown in that? I want to make a series of paintings called Acts of God showing the deluge, the confusion of Babel, the walls of Jericho falling flat, the destruction of Sodom, Yes, yes, yes, a hymn to the Old Testament Catastropher who makes things well but hurts and smashes them just as well. Or I would make a set of city scapes with the canal through them. Or

His pen paused above the page then descended and sketched the tree on Sauchiehall Lane, making it larger, and leafless, and among the tenements and back greens of Riddrie. Around it three dwarfish housewives were stretching ropes between iron clothes-poles, and he drew them from a memory of a home help who had looked after the house while his mother was dying. They wore headscarves, men’s boots, and big aprons covered their chests and skirts giving them a sexless, surgical look. At the top of the picture the tree’s highest branch stuck into a strip of sky among the tenement chimneys. He remembered a Blake engraving of a grey ocean with an arm sticking out of a wave, the hand clutching at the empty sky. Another Blake engraving showed a tiny pair of lovers watching a small frenzied figure set foot on a ladder so thin and high that the top rested in the sickle of a moon. A caption said, “I want! I want!” Thaw drew a moon in the sky above the treetop.

Next day he rose after breakfast and sat in a thick dressing gown before the living-room fire turning the sketch into a picture. In the evening Ruth called from the kitchen, where she was making the tea, “It seems to me if you’re well enough to paint you’re well enough to help with the housework.”

“True,” said Thaw.

“Then will you kindly set the table?”

“I’m too busy.”

“For Pete’s sake! It won’t take ten minutes.”

“If I stop now I won’t work so well when I start again.”

“I suppose you think your old picture is more important than anything else?”