Lanark: a life in 4 books (67 page)

“There is one question I am sure you are all asking yourselves: How are we to get rid of our bodily waste? Well, you know, that question is as old as humanity itself. We tend to forget that interior flush lavatories are comparatively recent inventions, and three quarters of the world doesn’t have them. For a while we must be content to use one of these, as our great-grandparents did.”

He held up a chamberpot.

“Those of you with small children probably have one already. New stocks are being rushed to the shops from the Cortexin Adhoc Sanitation plant at New Cumbernauld. Large orders have been placed with a small factory in Unthank which still makes the old-fashioned earthernware article, thus giving a much-needed boost to a neglected part of the city’s economy. And though many will have to manage without one for a short period, I am sure they will be able to improvise with some other domestic utensil. As to the removal of the waste, you will receive through the post, if you have not received it already, a packet of these.”

He held up a black plastic bag.

“This is large enough to comfortably hold the contents of one full chamberpot. When tied at the neck it is both damp proof and odour proof. These should be stacked
beside
, not
inside
, your usual midden or dustbin. To speed collection, the cleansing workers will be helped by the army. That is why you have seen so many soldiers on the street lately.”

“Soldiers don’t need guns to shift shit,” said Macfee.

“Washing, if kept to a minimum, will present no problem. Once your sink is blocked it can be used in the usual way, except that the dirty water (which should be employed more than once) should be ladled into a pail and emptied into a gutter or convenient piece of ground. The same goes for urine. Fortunately a spell of mild weather is forecast, and our liquid waste will either evaporate or flow into districts where the drains still work.”

“What if it rains?” said Macfee.

“But we must also tackle the
causes
of this dangerous annoyance. We have already demanded action from the council, whose slowness caused this disaster in the first place. We have appealed to the Cortexin Group, who manufactured the poison. Both reply that experts are being consulted, the matter will be considered, that in due course we will hear from them. This is not good enough. So Professor Eva Schtzngrm has been made leader of a team who are working to gain the technology to clear the gas themselves, and we are choosing a delegate to speak up boldly for Unthank at the general assembly of council states soon to be held in Provan. The fact is that the council has treated Unthank badly. It is a long time since they introduced their decimal calendar based on the twenty-five-hour day. They promised us new clocks, so we rashly scrapped the old ones, and the new clocks failed to arrive. I was a young man then and I confess that, like most people, I didn’t care. Everyone likes to feel they have plenty of time; nobody likes seeing how fast it passes. But we can’t cope with a public emergency without clocks, so we have created a new department, our own department of chronometry. This department has commandeered a television channel—this television channel—and I will show you what it is going to transmit.”

Sludden walked over to a clock hanging on a wall, a pendulum clock with a case shaped like a small log cabin.

“Fucking miraculous,” said Macfee, opening another beer can. Helen said, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

“This is one of many clocks recently unearthed from museums, lumber-rooms and antique shops. It may not look very impressive, but it is the first to be restored to perfect working order. When the others have been repaired they will be installed in the head offices of our essential services, and each one of them will be synchronized with this.”

Sludden pointed to a weight shaped like a fir cone.

“Notice that the weight has been wound up and placed on a small shelf immediately under the case. At the end of this announcement, I will suspend it, and the clock will strike the hours of midnight: the time when an old day dies and a new day begins. The sound will be reinforced by a long blast upon police and factory sirens, who will repeat the noise at noon tomorrow. Employees of the chronometry department have also taken over ninety-two church towers with bells in them, and from now on they too will broadcast the message of this little clock.

“I know that quiet-minded people will find this a rude intrusion on their privacy; that intellectuals will say that a return to a solar timescale, when we don’t have sunlight, is putting clocks backward, not forward; and that manual workers, who time themselves by their pulses, will find the whole business irrelevant. Never mind. This clock allows me to make definite promises. By eight o’clock tomorrow every house, mohome, office and factory will have received an envelope of plastic wastebags. By ten o’clock the first free tubes of plastic cement will be available at your local post office. And at every hour I or some other corporation representative will appear on this channel to tell you how things are going. And now—”

Said Sludden taking the weight in his hand—

“I wish you all a very good night. Eternity, for Greater Unthank, is drawing to an end.
Time
is about to begin.”

He suspended the weight. The pendulum swung left with a tick, then right with a tock. The clock face grew till it nearly filled the windscreen. Both hands pointed straight upright to a small door above the dial, which flapped open. A fat wooden bird popped out and in shouting “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck—” Macfee turned a switch and the windscreen went transparent. The three of them sat in a row and stared through it at the darkened carpark. Sirens, hooters and distant clanging could be heard outside. Helen switched on a light.

“A maniac!” said Macfee. “The man’s a maniac.”

“Oh no,” said Lanark. “I’ve known him a long time, and he’s not a maniac. As a private person I don’t trust him, but he seems to have thoroughly grasped the political situation. And that speech sounded honest to me.”

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“No, a friend of my wife.”

Macfee leaned over and grabbed Lanark’s lapels and said, “What’s the score?”

“Jimmy!” cried Helen.

Lanark cried, “What’s wrong?”

“That’s what I’m asking you! You’ve a council passport, right? And you work for social stability, right? You know Sludden, right? So just tell me what you folk are trying to do!”

Lanark had been half dragged across Helen’s lap, his ear was pressed against her thigh and comforting warmth began flowing through it. He said dreamily, “We’re trying to kill Unthank. Some of us.”

“Christ, that isn’t news. We’ve known that for ages in the shops! ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let the place die as long as my weans are spared.’ But you bastards are really putting the boot in now, aren’t you?
Aren’t you
?”

Macfee shifted a hand to grip Lanark’s nostrils and cover his mouth. Lanark found he was watching a bulging reflection of his face and Macfee’s hand on the side of a shiny kettle on a shelf a few inches away. The reflection flickered and grew dim and he supposed that when it went black he would be unconscious. He felt no pain so he was not much worried. Then he heard slapping sounds and Helen panting, “Let
go
, let him
go
.” he was released and heard much louder slapping sounds. Helen moaned, then yelled, “Clear out, mister! Leave us! Leave us alone!”

He found and pulled a handle and scrambled sideways out the door and slammed it shut. He hesitated beside the mohome, which was rocking slightly. Muffled noises came from the front seat and a frail childish wailing from the back. His eye was distracted by a lit poster on a gable showing an athletic couple in bathing costume playing beach ball with two laughing children. The message above said
MONEY IS TIME. TIME IS
LIFE. BUY MORE LIFE FOR YOUR FAMILY FROM
THE QUANTUM INTERMINABLE. (THEY’LL LOVE
YOU FOR IT.)

CHAPTER 39.

Divorce

“Let the place die as long as my weans are spared.” Jimmy’s words had brought Sandy alarmingly to mind. Lanark ran from the park and along some empty streets, trying to retrace his steps. A warm heavy rain began falling and the gutters filled rapidly. The surrounding houses were unfamiliar. He turned a corner, came to a railing and looked down over several levels of motorway at the dark tower and bright spire of the cathedral. He sighed with relief, climbed the rail and scrambled down a slope of slippery wet grass. The water was nearly two feet deep at the edge of the road and flowing swiftly sideways like a stream. He waded through to the drier lanes. The only vehicle he saw was a military jeep which whizzed round a curve sending out sizzling arcs of spray, then slowed down and stopped beside him.

“Come here!” cried a gruff voice. “I’ve a gun, so no funny business.”

Lanark went closer. A fat man in a colonel’s uniform sat beside the driver. The fat man said, “How many of you are there?”

“One.”

“Do you expect me to believe that? Where are you going?” “The cathedral.”

“Don’t you know you’re trespassing?”

“I’m just crossing a road.”

“Oh, no! You are crossing a freeway. Freeways are for the exclusive use of wheeled carriages propelled by engines burning refined forms of fossilized fuel, and don’t forget it…. Good heavens, it’s Lanark, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Are you McPake?”

“Of course. Get inside. Where did you say you were going?”

Lanark explained. McPake said, “Take us there, Cameron,” then he leaned back, chuckling. “I thought we had a riot on our hands when we saw you. We’re on the watch for them, you know, at times like these.”

The jeep turned down toward the cathedral square. Lanark said, “I suppose Rima told you about Alexander?”

McPake shook his head. “Sorry, I only know one Rima. She used to hang about with Sludden in the old Elite days. Had her myself once. What a woman! I thought she took off for the institute when you did.”

“Sorry, I’m getting confused,” said Lanark.

He sat in a state of miserable excitement until the jeep put him down at the cathedral gates. In the doorway he heard organ strains, and the floor inside held a scattering of elderly and middle-aged people (But
I’m
middle-aged, he thought), standing between the rows of chairs and singing that time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all her sons away, they fly, forgotten, as the dream dies at the opening day. He hurried past them with his mouth shaping denunciations, opened the small door, and rushed up the spiral stair, and along the window ledge, through the organ loft and past the cubicles of the attic. Rima and Alex were in none of them. He rushed to the kitchen and stared at Frankie and Jack, who looked up, startled, from a card game. He said, “Where are they?” There was an embarrassed silence; then Frankie said in a small voice, “She said she left a note for you.”

He hurried back and found the empty cubicle. A note lay on the carefully made bed.

Dear Lanark
,

I expect you won’t be surprised to find us gone. Things haven’t been
very good lately, have they. Alexander and I will be living with Sludden,
as we arranged, and on the whole it’s better that you aren’t coming
too. Please don’t try to find us—Alex is naturally a bit upset by all
this and I don’t want you to make him worse
.

You probably think I’ve gone with Sludden because he has a
big house, and is famous, and is a better lover than you in most
ways, but that isn’t the real reason. It may surprise you to hear that
Sludden needs me more than you do. I don’t think you need anybody.
No matter how bad things get, you will always plod on without caring
what other people think or feel. You’re the most selfish man I know
.

Dear Lanark, I don’t hate you but whenever I try to write some¬
thing friendly it turns out nasty, perhaps because if you give the devil
your little finger he bites off the whole arm. But you’ve often been
nice to me, you aren’t really a devil
.

Love

Rima

P.S. I’m coming back to collect some clothes and things. I may see
you then
.

He undressed slowly, got into bed, switched off the light and fell asleep at once. He woke several times feeling that something horrible had happened which he must tell Rima about, then he remembered what it was. Lying drearily awake he sometimes heard the cathedral bell tolling the hours. Once it struck five o’clock and when he awoke later it was striking three, which suggested that the regular marking of time had not slowed it down much.

At last he opened his eyes to the electric light. She stood by the bed quietly taking clothes from the chest of drawers. He said, “Hullo.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“How’s Sandy?”

“Very quiet but quite happy, I think. He has plenty of room to run about and Sludden lives outside the danger zone so there’s no stink, of course.”

“There’s no stink here.”

“In another twenty-four hours I’m sure even you will begin to notice it.”

She snapped the suitcase shut and said, “I wanted to pack this before I left but I was afraid you would suddenly come in and get hysterical.”

“When have you seen me hysterical?” he asked peevishly.

“I don’t remember. Of course that’s partly your trouble, isn’t it? Sludden and I often discuss you, and he thinks you would be a very valuable man if you knew how to release your emotions.”

He lay rigid, clenching his fists and teeth in order not to scream. She placed the suitcase by the bed foot and sat on it, twisting a handkerchief. She said, “Oh, Lanark, I don’t like hurting you but I must explain why I’m leaving. You think I’m greedy and ungrateful and prefer Sludden because he’s a far better lover, but that’s not why. Women can live quite comfortably with a clumsy lover if he makes them happy in other ways. But you’re too serious all the time. You make my ordinary little feelings seem as fluffy and useless as bits of dust. You make life a duty, something to be examined and corrected.