Lanark: a life in 4 books (71 page)

“The future of a crippled region,” said the morose man slowly, “is usually hammered out by one of the subcommittees.”

“Which subcommittee? When and where does it meet?”

“This is a friendly social reception!” said the Red Girl, looking distressed. “Can’t we keep all this heavy stuff till later? There’s going to be
such
a lot of it.”

“Shut up, dear,” said the morose man. “Wilkins knows all the ropes. You’d better ask him.”

“Listen,” said the Red Girl. “I’ll take you to Nastler. He knows everything about everything, and he’s expecting to see you soon in the Epilogue room. He told me so.”

“Who is Nastler?”

“Our king. In a way. But he’s not at all grand,” said the Red Girl evasively. “It’s hard to explain.”

The morose man guffawed and said, “He’s a joker. You’ll get nothing out of him.”

Lanark opened his briefcase, locked the assembly programme inside and stood up.

“I understand that you are employed to help me with my difficulties,” he told the Red Girl. “I will speak to both Wilkins and this Nastler person. Which can I see first?”

“Oh Nastler, definitely,” said the red girl, looking relieved.

“He’s an invalid, anyone can see him anytime. But won’t you drink your coffee first?”

“No,” said Lanark, and thanked the morose man, and followed the Red Girl into the crowd.

Weems and the Monboddos were still shaking hands with the queue by the door, which was a short one now. As Lanark passed them the announcer was saying, “Chairman Fu of Xanadu. Proto-Presbyter Griffith-Powys of Ynyswitrin. Premier Multan of Zimbabwe.”

The Red Girl led him along the outer corridor till they came to a white panel without hinges or handle. She said, “It’s a door. Go through it.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“If you’re going to talk politics, I’m going to wait outside.” As Lanark pressed the surface he noticed a big word on it:

EPILOGUE

He entered a room with no architectural similarity to the building he had left. The door on this side had deeply moulded panels and a knob, the ceiling was bordered by an elaborate cornice of acanthus sprays, there was a tall bay window with the upper foliage of a chestnut tree outside and an old stone tenement beyond. The rest of the room was hidden by easels holding large paintings of the room. The pictures seemed brighter and cleaner than the reality and a tall beautiful girl with long blond hair reclined in them, sometimes nude and sometimes clothed. The girl herself, more worried and untidy than her portraits, stood near the door wearing a paint-stained butcher’s apron. With a very small brush she was adding leaves to a view of the tree outside the window, but she paused, pointed round the edge of the picture and told Lanark, “He’s there.”

A voice said, “Yes, come round, come round.”

Lanark went behind the picture and found a stout man leaning against a pile of pillows on a low bed. His face, framed by wings and horns of uncombed hair, looked statuesque and noble apart from an apprehensive, rather cowardly expression. He wore a woollen jersey over a pyjama jacket, neither of them clean, the coverlet over his knees was littered with books and papers, and there was a pen in his hand. Glancing at Lanark in a sly sideways fashion he indicated a chair with the pen and said, “Please sit down.”

“Are you the king of this place?”

“The king of Provan, yes. And Unthank too. And that suite of rooms you call the institute and the council.”

“Then perhaps you could help me. I am here—”

“Yes, I know roughly what you want and I would like to help. I would even offer you a drink, but there’s too much intoxication in this book.”

“Book?”

“This world, I meant to say. You see I’m the king, not the government. I have laid out landscapes, and stocked them with people, and I still work an occasional miracle, but governing is left to folk like Monboddo and Sludden.”

“Why?”

The king closed his eyes, smiled and said, “I brought you here to ask that question.”

“Will you answer it?”

“Not yet.”

Lanark felt very angry. He stood up and said, “Then talking to you is a waste of time.”

“Waste of time!” said the king, opening his eyes. “You clearly don’t realize who I am. I have called myself a king—that’s a purely symbolic name, I’m far more important. Read this and you’ll understand. The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence but I don’t care.”
1

With a reckless gesture he handed Lanark a paper from the bed. It was covered with childish handwriting and many words were scored out or inserted with little arrows. Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark’s eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said:
Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark’s
eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said:

Lanark gave the paper back asking, “What’s that supposed to prove?”

“I am your author.”

Lanark stared at him. The author said, “Please don’t feel embarrassed. This isn’t an unprecedented situation. Vonnegut has it in
Breakfast of Champions
and Jehovah in the books of Job and Jonah.”

“Are you pretending to be God?”

“Not nowadays. I used to be part of him, though. Yes, I am part of a part which was once the whole. But I went bad and was excreted. If I can get well I may be allowed home before I die, so I continually plunge my beak into my rotten liver and swallow and excrete it. But it grows again. Creation festers in me. I am excreting you and your world at the present moment. This arse-wipe”—he stirred the papers on the bed—“is part of the process.”

“I am not religious,” said Lanark, “but I don’t like you mixing religion with excrement. Last night I saw part of the person you are referring to and it was not at all nasty.”

“You saw part of God?” cried the author. “How did that happen?”

Lanark explained. The author was greatly excited. He said, “Say those words again.”

“
Is … is … is …
, then a pause, then
Is … if …
is
. …”

“If?” shouted the author sitting upright. “He actually said if? He wasn’t simply snarling ‘Is, is, is, is, is,’ all the time?”

Lanark said, “I don’t like you saying ‘he’ like that. What I saw may not have been masculine. It may not have been human. But it certainly wasn’t snarling. What’s wrong with you?”

The author had covered his mouth with his hands, apparently to stifle laughter, but his eyes were wet. He gulped and said, “One
if
to five
is
es! That’s an incredible amount of freedom. But can I believe you? I’ve created you honest, but can I trust your senses? At a great altitude
is
and
if
must sound very much alike.”

“You seem to take words very seriously,” said Lanark with a touch of contempt.

“Yes. You don’t like me, but that can’t be helped. I’m pri
ma
rily a literary man,” said the author with a faintly nasal accent, and started chuckling to himself.

The tall blond girl came round the edge of the painting wiping her brush on her apron. She said defiantly, “I’ve finished the tree. Can I leave now?”

The author leaned back on his pillows and said sweetly, “Of course, Marion. Leave when you like.”

“I need money. I’m hungry.”

“Why don’t you go to the kitchen? I believe there’s some cold chicken in the fridge, and I’m sure Pat won’t mind you making yourself a snack.”

“I don’t want a snack, I want a meal with a friend in a restaurant. And I want to go to a film afterward, or to a pub, or to a hairdresser if I feel like it. I’m sorry, but I want money.”

“Of course you do, and you’ve earned it. How much do I owe?”

“Five hours today at fifty pence an hour is two pounds fifty. With yesterday and the day before and the day before is ten pounds, isn’t it?”

“I’ve a poor head for arithmetic but you’re probably right,” said the author, taking coins from under a pillow and giving them to her. “This is all I have just now, nearly two pounds. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can manage a little extra.” The girl scowled at the coins in her hand and then at the author. He was puffing medicinal spray into his mouth from a tiny hand-pump. She went abruptly behind the painting again and they heard the door slam.

“A strange girl,” murmured the author, sighing. “I do my best to help her but it isn’t easy.”

Lanark had been sitting with his head propped on his hands. He said, “You say you are creating me.”

“I am.”

“Then how can I have experiences you don’t know about?

You were surprised when I told you what I saw from the aircraft.”

“The answer to that is unusually interesting; please attend closely. When
Lanark
is finished (I am calling the work after you) it will be roughly two hundred thousand words and forty chapters long, and divided into books three, one, two and four.”

“Why not one, two, three and four?”

“I want
Lanark
to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another. It’s an old device. Homer, Vergil, Milton and Scott Fitzgerald used it.
2
There will also be a prologue before book one, an interlude in the centre, and an epilogue two or three chapters before the end.”

“I thought epilogues came after the end.”

“Usually, but mine is too important to go there. Though not essential to the plot it provides some comic distraction at a moment when the narrative sorely needs it. And it lets me utter some fine sentiments which I could hardly trust to a mere character. And it contains critical notes which will save research scholars years of toil. In fact my epilogue is so essential that I am working on it with nearly a quarter of the book still unwritten. I am working on it here, just now, in this conversation. But you have had to reach this room by passing through several chapters I haven’t clearly imagined yet, so you know details of the story which I don’t. Of course I know the broad general outline. That was planned years ago and mustn’t be changed. You have come here from my city of destruction, which is rather like Glasgow, to plead before some sort of world parliament in an ideal city based on Edinburgh, or London, or perhaps Paris if I can wangle a grant from the Scottish Arts Council
3
to go there. Tell me, when you were landing this morning, did you see the Eiffel Tower? Or Big Ben? Or a rock with a castle on it?”

“No. Provan is very like—”

“Stop! Don’t tell me. My fictions often anticipate the experiences they’re based upon, but no author should rely on that sort of thing.”

Lanark was so agitated that he stood and walked to the window to sort out his thoughts. The author struck him as a slippery person but too vain and garrulous to be impressive. He went back to the bed and said, “How will my story end?”

“Catastrophically. The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason.”

“Listen,” said Lanark. “I never tried to be a delegate. I never wanted anything but some sunlight, some love, some very ordinary happiness. And every moment I have been thwarted by organizations and things pushing in a different direction, and now I’m nearly an old man and my reasons for living have shrunk to standing up in public and saying a good word for the only people I know. And you tell me that word will be useless! That you have
planned
it to be useless.”

“Yes,” said the author, nodding eagerly. “Yes, that’s right.” Lanark gaped down at the foolishly nodding face and suddenly felt it belonged to a horrible ventriloquist’s doll. He raised a clenched fist but could not bring himself to strike. He swung round and punched a painting on an easel and both clattered to the floor. He pushed down the other painting beside the door, went to a tall bookcase in a corner and heaved it over. Books cascaded from the upper shelves and it hit the floor with a crash which shook the room. There were long low shelves around the walls holding books, folders, bottles and tubes of paint. With sweeps of his arm he shoved these to the floor, then turned, breathing deeply, and stared at the bed. The author sat there looking distressed, but the paintings and easels were back in their old places, and glancing around Lanark saw the bookcases had returned quietly to the corner and books, folders, bottles and paint were on the shelves again.

“A conjuror!” said Lanark with loathing. “A damned conjuror!”

“Yes,” said the conjuror humbly, “I’m sorry. Please sit down and let me explain why the story has to go like this. You can eat while I talk (I’m sure you’re hungry) and afterward you can tell me how you think I could be better. Please sit down.” The bedside chair was small but comfortably upholstered. A table had appeared beside it with covered dishes on a tray. Lanark felt more exhausted than hungry, but after sitting for a while he removed a cover out of curiosity. There was a bowl beneath of dark red oxtail soup, so taking a spoon he began to eat.

“I will start,” said the conjuror, “by explaining the physics of the world you live in. Everything you have experienced and are experiencing, from your first glimpse of the Elite café to the metal of that spoon in your fingers, the taste of the soup in your mouth, is made of one thing.”

“Atoms,” said Lanark.

“No. Print. Some worlds are made of atoms but yours is made of tiny marks
4
marching in neat lines, like armies of insects, across pages and pages and pages of white paper. I say these lines are marching, but that is a metaphor. They are perfectly still. They are lifeless. How can
they
reproduce the movement and noises of the battle of Borodino, the white whale ramming the ship, the fallen angels on the flaming lake?”

“By being read,” said Lanark impatiently.

“Exactly. Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed world and trapping it here long enough for us to steal the imaginative energy which gives us life. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing abominable things. I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentences. When I need more striking sentences or ideas I steal them from other writers, usually twisting them to blend with my own. Worst of all I am using the great world given at birth—the world of atoms—as a ragbag of shapes and colours to make this second-hand entertainment look more amusing.”