Lanark: a life in 4 books (52 page)

“Well, my doctor’s told me the same thing. You see, my mother committed suicide when I was three which probably … and then I lived with an aunt and the doctor thinks I made myself ill to … to be attended to. He said first I gave myself pleurisy and then anaemia and then colds, so now I’m going to a psychiatrist. Are you all right?”

Thaw stared at her. He heard the words but they seemed meaningless.

“Did you know that somebody, I forget his name, said you were a genius? Do you know who said that?”

Thaw stared at her.

“I forget his name but he’s a painter…. I think his first name begins with B. He’s quite well known. Anyway, that should make you feel … rather … I’m expecting Peter here soon. Did you know I was married?”

Thaw stood up awkwardly and climbed to the street. A Riddrie tram stopped at nearby traffic lights and he boarded with an effort. His seat in the downstairs cabin seemed to be a dog. When he looked at it or stroked it with his hand it was clearly a seat, but when he closed his eyes against the glare it seemed a huge dog. Getting up to the house was difficult. Inside he squatted on the hearth rug and pressed his fists to his aching brow. After a while he felt the rug get up, walk to the bedroom and tip him onto the bed. He got his clothes and shoes off and pulled the blankets over him. Oblivion seemed to fall on him from the ceiling like a ton of bricks.

He wakened in the air above his body which lay with open mouth and eyes, the head lolling sideways off the pillow. He wondered whether to leave it but it moved, groaned, and at once he became part of it and sat up. He was full of dull peace. No noise came from the main road outside, not the faintest sound from upstairs or down. Air flowed in and out of his lungs so easily that he would have imagined himself dead if he hadn’t felt hungry. He pulled the heavy bedclothes aside, lowered his feet to the floor, tried carefully to stand and fell down. He lay awhile with his head under a chair, shuddering with laughter, and later drew his clothes on without standing and crawled into the kitchen, shaking his head from side to side and muttering, “All for a bit of skin, all for a bit of dried skin.” Pulling himself upright with difficulty he ate two oatcakes, washed and ate a shrivelled carrot, and that was all his stomach could hold. He sat on a chair and tried to arrange the thoughts in his head like pieces on a chessboard, but the thoughts were few and small and kept slipping between his fingers, so he stared at a spider which sat on the electric stove twitching far too many legs. He loathed it and brought the weight of his clenched fist down on it, yet when he withdrew the hand the insect sat there, twitching and unhurt. He struck many times in a fit of rage but the blows did not flatten it, and he stopped when the metal-topped stove had bruised his fist.

Suddenly words came to him out of the air, whispered by an invisible beak. He became tense, said “Yes,” walked upright out of the house, shut the door behind him and started fingering his pockets to learn if he had the key.

“Too many pockets,” he mumbled. “Must sew some up. Oh.” Mrs. Colquhoun’s cat sat in the opposite doorway looking at him. Part of her head and throat was missing. The right side was cut away and he saw the brain in section, white and pink and pleated like the underneath of a mushroom. The cat yawned, opening her half-mouth wide and unrolling her tongue across the white needle teeth. Thaw could see the tongue down to its root in the thin corridor of her throat. His lips moved, speaking indistinct words about his terror. His fingers shut upon the key’s cold steel. Clutching it for comfort he went down to the street. The air was warm and the sky as black as tar. A red planet in the middle put out rings of dark air like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. Thaw obeyed the whisper and turned left. The whisperer was a black crow which flew behind his head. In the great silence its orders were very distinct. He was himself that black bird looking down on Duncan Thaw and the streets he walked through. Sometimes he soared to the end of a street, leaving the small walking figure behind, or he would drop back and follow at a distance. At corners he came up, bringing his beak close to an ear to whisper:
turn
this way, turn that
. At the end of one street a rusty gate was chained shut and twined with convolvulus, but he squeezed between some bent railings. He saw the crimson planet between pagoda-shaped growths whose brittle fleshy stalks sweated white syrup. The crow flapped up the cinder path in front of his feet, chattering wildly:

“
Eenty teenty haligalum
the head is hatched, the sky is crackit
and John Knox boozed up a kee-kark lum
and all the Gods are humpy-kee-kark, kee-kark, kee-kark
.”

Thaw staggered, slipped and was flying. The crow soared a hundred feet below him. His position and speed depended on it. They passed above the dull ribbon of the weedy canal and he saw into rooms where women ironed beneath pulleys hung with washing, men in shirtsleeves read newspapers, children and lovers lay under quilts in dim bedrooms. He swung as if on trapezes across the city’s cut honeycomb. The intricate compact life fascinated, then appalled him. He covered his eyes. His feet touched ground at once.

He leaned his stomach on a baluster of the bridge and folded his arms on the parapet. He felt sick. The river had shrunk to a narrow trickle among cracked mudflats. A thin cloud of gulls screamed above something dead under the suspension bridge to the east. A subterranean murmuring began as a vibrration in the soles of the feet, increased until it thrummed on his eardrums and welled over the horizon like the thunder of a gong. He raised his head and saw the warehouses on the left bank. The city beyond them was growing into the sky. First the towers of the municipal building ascended, and beyond them the hump of Rotten Row with all the tenement windows lit, and then the squat cathedral spire with tower and nave and a nearby cluster of Royal infirmary domes and beyond those, like the last section of a telescope, the tomb-rotten pile of the Necropolis slid up with the John Knox column overtopping the rest. The book in the hand of the stone man struck across the throbbing planet and a blue shadow sped from the book to Thaw’s heart, chilling it. The city was forcing itself into the sky on every side. Factory, university, gasometer, slag-bing, ridges of tenements, parks loaded with trees ascended until he looked up at a horizon like the rim of a bowl with himself at the bottom. The rim was crowded with watchers. He felt a rage of self-pity that so many were focussing on as few as he and saluted them with two fingers. One of the watchers left the rim and passed down out of sight behind rooftops. Thaw shut his eyes and imagined her descending the streets like a water drop sliding down the side of a basin, then he walked over the bridge and met her at Paisley’s corner.

She smiled and took his arm and he was competent. He grinned to see himself shift his arm to her waist as they walked and how his remarks made her giggle. He flapped and tumbled in the air above their heads, helpless and screeching with laughter, then brought his beak close to an ear and made suggestions. They climbed a narrow road between staring crowds. Sometimes he recognized a face to the left or right, but he had to keep his whole attention on Marjory, feeding her with the talk which made her smile and being careful not to laugh. She did not notice that the hand holding hers was as senseless as granite and prevented by an effort from crushing her finger-bones. They crossed the rocking planks of the canal bridge, passed some warehouses and climbed a grassy slope. Thaw went first, pulling her behind. She was laughing when he forced her down and rubbed her body and neck with his stone hands. She struggled.

“Quick quick quick!” screamed the crow. “Cut her off quick.” He moved his stone mouth across her throat into the angle of the jaw near the ear and cut her off quick.

He woke in drizzling rain with a crust on his lips and something beside him he did not want to see. He attempted to fly home but was too breathless to do it for more than short distances, otherwise he crawled on the slimy towpath. Coming upstairs he kept falling from side to side and inside the house he lay on the lobby floor and started grunting, mainly for breath but partly for attention. He grunted louder and louder until a policeman broke the lock of the door. He expected to go to prison, but a doctor was there and they lifted and laid him in bed. The doctor gave a morphine injection and he fell into a sweet sleep. He woke in the Southern General Hospital and was nearly a fortnight there.

CHAPTER 30.

Surrender

Lanark stared through the ward window at a bed which seemed a reflection of his own except that the figure in it was under the sheets. He said, “Did Thaw really kill someone or was that another hallucination?”

I’m only able to tell the story as he saw it.

“But did the police arrest him?”

No. In hospital he kept vaguely expecting them to, but they didn’t come, which worried him. He wanted to get away from everything he knew, and arrest would have made that easy. “Then it was a hallucination.”

Not necessarily. In 1956 there were a hundred and fifty officially recognized murders in Britain, a third of them unsolved. Thaw certainly felt he had done something foul but denouncing himself to the police needed effort, so he thought as little and slept as much as possible. He didn’t dream nowadays. His mind was under a cold bandage of dullness.

He had a bruised hand, malnutrition and bronchial asthma, and received cortisone steroids, a new drug which healed the asthma in two days. The other things took longer. The hospital almoner wanted to contact his father but Thaw withheld the address. He said he would visit Mr. Thaw when he got out, not really meaning to.

He was released, went home, and packed a small canvas knapsack with some clothes and a shaving kit.

“You said he had given up shaving.”

He resumed it after the
Evening News
article in order not to look like his newspaper photograph. The knapsack contained one of Mr. Thaw’s old compasses. With over nine pounds in his pocket he went to the bus station at the end of Parliamentary Road. He thought of going to London, of sliding down the globe into the cluttered and peopled south, but at the station the needle of his mental compass swung completely and pointed to the northern firths and mountains. He decided to visit his father after all.

Consider him passing along the route described at the start of Book One, Chapter 18 only he dozes most of the way and gets out at Glehcoe village. He walks up a narrow road to the youth hostel, a road through a tunnel of branches. It is autumn, when the highlands are rich with purples, oranges and greeny-golds which would look gaudy if the grey light didn’t soften them.

“Leave out the local colour.”

All right.

It isn’t yet five o’clock and some climbers are waiting on the hostel steps. Thaw walks round the side of the building to the warden’s quarters at the back, but before knocking at the door he looks through a window. The room is a neat one with small watercolours of Loch Lomond on the walls which used to hang in the living room at Riddrie. He recognizes also a bookcase, writing desk and wooden tobacco jar carved in the shape of an owl. His father sits reading in an easy chair by a warm stove. There is a teapot under a cosy on a low table at his elbow, some cups, a cut-glass sugar bowl, milk jug and plate of biscuits. Two women sit on a sofa opposite. One is grey-haired and sixtyish; the other might be her daughter and is dark-haired and fortyish. The older woman knits, the younger reads. The quiet interior has a completeness, a calm contented polish, which Thaw feels should not be touched. He can break it, not add to it, so he finds a gap in the hedge leading to the road and returns to the village.

He has tea in a restaurant for tourists and wonders what to do. Going back to Glasgow feels impossible so he goes toward Fort William.

The lochside road is a dull one and at the dreary slate-bings by Ballachulish his breathing worsens and later makes him sit on a low wall beside a line of cars queuing for the ferry. An American lady stands by her car staring up the hill at a whitish stone thing like an old-fashioned petrol pump in the woods above. She asks, “Do you know what that is?”

He tells her he thinks it marks the spot where Colin Campbell, nicknamed the Red Fox, was murdered. She smiles slowly and says, “Did I read about that in Robert Stevenson’s
Kidnapped?
” Thaw says it is possible. She says, “You don’t look too well. Can I do anything to help?”

He mentions the illness and says it will pass. She says, “My husband is also a sufferer,” and gets back into the car. Then she comes out and hands him a paper tissue with some blue and pink torpedo-shaped pellets in it. She says, “Try one of these, they’re new.”

He swallows one and a moment later a happy warmth spreads through him. He looks at her lovingly. She says, “Don’t take more than four a day, they can make you high. We’re going to Mallaig, can we give you a lift?”

He steps into a detached part of America. The seats seem upholstered in soft buffalo hide, the climate is five degrees above skin heat, somewhere a tiny orchestra is playing. The engine is inaudible and, once over the ferry, the lochs and mountains, like films projected onto the windows, pass backward at great speed. The driver, a taciturn man with a thick neck, asks Thaw where he’s heading. After a while Thaw says he’s going to Stirr. The lady says, “You may find Henry a little taciturn. There’s a blood clot in President Eisenhower’s brain and the market’s responding badly.”

Thaw shuts his eyes and dimly sees his father and sister in a grey field. Mr. Thaw holds out a skein of wool which his sister winds into a ball. When he opens his eyes it is dark and the car climbs a long winding drive to a building like Balmoral Castle but with a neon hotel sign on the front. He is breathless again. The lady says, “We’ve looked up Stirr on the map and you’ll never make it tonight. We’re going to stay here and we suggest you do the same. It’s a little expensive but—”