The Ends of Our Tethers (11 page)

Coming abreast of an Irish pub we call in for a refreshment, emerging half an hour later to join the procession behind the banner of Unison, the local government employees' union. A small brass band is playing a melancholy Scots ditty and I am astonished to find myself on the brink of tears. This sentiment owes nothing to a recent sup of lager. Our huge movement is composed of Scottish workers, tradespeople, professional people who identify with them – all people I feel at home with. These folk will suffer most if our businessmen take the advice of an expert in Scottish Enterprise, formerly known as The Scottish Development Agency. He has advised Scottish businesses to have their goods made by workers in Eastern Europe or Asia.

We arrive in a desert of car parks covering the site of the former Princess Dock, a vast basin surrounded by huge cranes where giant ships unloaded cargoes and took them aboard during the Suez War when Glasgow was a great international port and centre of manufacture. The huge car parks are more crowded with multitudes than Glasgow Green. Beyond them I see some big arched metallic structures that seem to have slid out of each other, a building locally nicknamed The Armadillo. I realise for the first time that this Armadillo is the Glasgow conference centre. A line of yellow-jacketed police is looped protectively around it. From the height of an open-topped double decker bus near the river someone is making a speech, but loud speakers are banned so few phrases are audible. Some storms of applause are heard and we hope the Prime Minister hears them and sees how many we are. We later learn, however, that —

(A) Tony Blair did not speak to the Scottish Trade Union conference in the afternoon, as scheduled, but changed it to ten in the morning so he could leave
the district, and perhaps Glasgow, before we left the Green, and

(B) The speaker aboard the bus was Glasgow's Lord Provost, or the leader of the Scottish Socialist Party Tommy Sheridan, or a spokesman for the Church of Scotland, or for Scotland's Asiatic communities, or for the CND, because all made speeches from there.

After half an hour we come away, moving against the flood of people still approaching from the City Centre, for the procession has been longer than its three mile route. The ruler of Britain will learn nothing from this peaceful rally, or those in New York, Sydney and most major European capitals. Are the commanders of armies in great and small, rich and poor nations right to think that only destructive violence can defeat destructive violence? No. Within the last forty years, tyrants ruling by force of arms and torture in Greece, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Russia gave way to kinder, more democratic rulers without invasion and warfare. What that Jewish extremist, Jesus, preached from a small hill

near Jerusalem, was

not idiotic.

I
SAW A PLAIN STREWN WITH marble rocks, the smallest higher than a man, the largest as big as a cathedral. They were pieces of a statue that had once stood taller than Ben Nevis. Groups of little people moved with horse-drawn wagons among these rocks. They were searching for a piece recognisably human yet small enough to carry away – the lobe of an ear or tip of a toe. Each group wanted to put such a fragment where they could love and pray to it, as it would prove there had once been power, beauty and unity that the world no longer contained. A group found a rock pierced by a beautifully smooth oval arch, part of a nostril. As they lifted it into their cart other groups combined to attack and rob them. This happened to all who found
a good fragment, so none was ever carried away and love and prayer were impossible. I opened my eyes because my Japanese host was asking a question.

“In the second chapter of book ten you say
till all the seas gang dry, my dear
. My useful dictionary defines
gang
as a band of ruffians or criminals, a number of labourers working together. None of these definitions seems to fit.”

I said that
gang
was also a Scottish transitive and intransitive verb meaning
go
and these words were a quotation from Robert Burns's greatest love song. My host murmured politely, “I believe Robert Burns's poetry is still sung in parts of North America.”

I nodded. I was happy.

We were in the Smooth Grove, which had been the Central Station Hotel in days when Glasgow was joined to other places by railway. I felt the luxury of a good meal in my stomach, good wine on my palate, clean socks, underwear and shirt against my skin. They had been worth waiting for. Foreign translators, journalists and writers of dissertations always buy me new clothes
before standing me a lunch – posh restaurants won't let me in without new clothes after I've slept a few weeks in ones the last foreigner bought me. Foreigners contact me through my bank. Ordinary pubs and all-night cafés accept me since I can pay for drink and food and can sleep in short snatches sitting upright.

I was not always dependent on foreigners for a smart appearance. I used to have several friends with homes and visited each of them once a fortnight. They gave me food and a bed for the night and put my clothes through a machine. Modern machines not only wash, dry and iron, they remove stains, mend holes, replace lost buttons and re-dye faded fabric to look like new. Or am I dreaming that? If I am dreaming such a machine it is certainly possible because, as William Blake said, nothing exists which was not first dreamed. Most of these friends steadily disappeared but were not, I think, stabbed or burned. People with homes still usually die of diseases or a silly accident.

My one remaining friend is now my first wife who pretends to be my daughter. I don't know why. I visited her a month ago. After
enjoying a plate of her excellent soup I asked how Mavis was getting on in London. She stared and said, “I am Mavis. Cathy is dead – died twelve years ago, shortly after I came home.”

“Nonsense Cathy!” I said. “You can't be Mavis because Mavis quarrelled with you and she was right to quarrel with you because you were not kind to her, though I was too tactful to say so at the time.”

My host in the Smooth Grove was as ancient as I am and still used a notebook. Looking up from it he said, “I hear there is now no middle class in Scotland and England. Is that true?”

I told him it was not true: the middle class are those who used to be called working class – they have jobs but no investments, and their only pensions are state pensions. “But middle class implies a lower class. Who are they?”

I explained that thieves, swindlers, rapists, drug dealers and murderers are our lower class nowadays, many of them registered with the police. They have a place in society because without them police, lawyers, judges, jailers and journalists would be unemployed, and the profits of
drug companies would slump.

“So in Britain everyone has a place in the social fabric?”

“Everyone but the homeless,” I answered, trying to remember why I feel perfectly secure though I am one of these.

My host started writing again and to avoid disturbing thoughts I dreamed of a future state in which human police had disappeared because the rich no longer needed them. The rich never left their luxurious, well-defended homes except when visiting each other in vehicles moving at the speed of light. Each home was protected by a metallic creature the size of a kitten and resembling a cockroach. It hid under chairs and sideboards and was programmed to kill intruders. I was a low-class criminal who broke into the apartments of a rich young sexy woman, cunningly reprogrammed her police creature to serve me, then enjoyed a number of sexual acts which appeared to be drawn in a highly coloured, very entertaining strip cartoon of a kind which became popular in France at the end of the twentieth century and in Britain at the start of the next, though many British people then
were still able to read. We had a very entertaining country in those days. I had been teaching abroad since the late seventies and every time I returned the changes struck me as so interesting that I wrote about them.

Yes, one year publishers sold my stories to a newspaper cartoon supplement for so much that I stopped teaching and brought my second wife home to Glasgow. She was from Los Angeles or Chicago, I think, and believed that life for prosperous people was the same anywhere, and indeed Britain was now very like America. The police only patrolled the streets of prosperous ghettos where householders had bought crime insurance. The police observed other communities through public surveillance cameras and had power to swoop in and uplift anyone on suspicion, but they mainly lifted unregistered politicians and folk who owed money to drug dealers. When people fell down in the street it was no longer etiquette to help them up or summon an ambulance. We hurried past knowing that next day they would probably be gone. I had a lovely home in those days. I lost it in a wave of inflation which suddenly made life
astonishingly
interesting. My wife returned to the USA.. I stayed out of curiosity though
British publishing had stopped. Not even newspapers were produced. Industries with a use for wood and rag pulp bought the remaining libraries. Some books are still used to give public houses an old-fashioned look. Boys' adventure stories from the 1910s predominate.

My host said, “Toward the end of your eleventh book you mention
no concurrency of
bone
. What do you mean by that?”

All foreigners ask that question. I can now answer it without thinking. While doing so I closed my eyes and enjoyed walking on a grassy hilltop beside a tall, slender, beautiful young woman I had loved when I was fifty. Even in this dream I knew our love was in the past, that my virility was dead and that no beautiful woman would ever love me again. I told her this. She grew angry and called me selfish because I was only dreaming of her to cheer myself up. This was obviously true so I forgot her by staring at a hill on the far side of a valley, a Scottish hill soaring to Alpine heights with all the buildings I have ever known in rows between strips of woodland, heather and rocky cliffs. On the crest of the mountain I saw the red sandstone gable of the tenement
where I was born in 1934, at the bottom I recognised the grey clock tower of the Smooth Grove where I was dining and dreaming. The scene delighted me by its blend of civilisation and wilderness, past and present, by the ease with which the eye grasped so much rich intricacy. Suddenly the colour drained from it. The heather turned grey, the trees leafless, but I still felt perfectly safe and remembered why.

Though still telling my host about the massacre of Glencoe and Ezekiel's valley of dry bones I remembered the death of Mr Anderson, a former radio announcer with whom I once shared a kind of cave, a very safe secret little hidey-hole, we thought, in a shrubbery of Kelvingrove Park. In those days I had not learned to sleep in small snatches while sitting upright so I slept by drinking half a bottle of methylated spirits. One morning I woke to find my companion had been stabbed to death and scalped. I did not know why I had been spared until several weeks or months or years later. Perhaps it was yesterday. I'm sure I did not dream it.

I stood on the canal towpath enjoying a glorious gold, green and lavender sunset when I was tripped and knocked down. I lay flat on my back surrounded by children of seven, eight or nine. Their sex was not obvious. All wore black jeans and leather jackets. All had skulls and crossbones painted or tattooed on top of heads that were bald except for a finger length of small pigtails all round. One poured petrol over my trousers, the rest waved bats, cutting implements, firelighters and discussed which part of me to bruise, cut or set fire to first.

“We are the death squad of the Maryhill Cleansing Brigade,” explained the leader who was perhaps eleven or twelve. “We are licensed terrorists with a sacred mission to save the British economy through a course of geriatric disposal. Too many old gerries are depressing the economy these days. If you can't afford to get rejuvenated, grampa, you should have the decency to top yourself before becoming a burden to the state.”

I told him I wasn't a burden to the state, wasn't even a beggar, that money was paid into my bank account by foreign publishers and was enough to feed me
though not enough to rent a room.

“You pathetic, hairy old driveller!” shouted the leader, goading himself or herself into a fury. “You're an eyesore! The visual equivalent of a force-nine-gale fart! You will die in hideous agony as a warning to others.”

I was alarmed but excited. To die must be an awfully big adventure. Then a small fat person with glasses said, “Wait a bit, Jimsy, I think he's famous.”

They consulted a folded sheet with a lot of faces and names printed on it. The fat person, who could read names, asked if I was Mr Thingumajig, which I am. They helped me up, dusted me down, shook my hand very solemnly one at a time, said they would remember me next time we met, said they would gladly kill any old friend I wanted rid off, advised me not to go near a naked flame before my trousers were dry, hoped I had no hard feelings. Honestly, I had none at all. My gratitude and love for these children was so great that I wept real tears. The leader got me to autograph the printed sheet. It was pleasant to meet a young Scot who still valued my signature. The sun had not yet set when they left me. I watched the gloaming fade, warm in the
knowledge that I had a privileged place in modern Britain. Not only the children liked me but their bosses in the Cleansing Company or Social Security Trust or Education Industry or whoever had a use for children nowadays.

Yes, somebody up there likes me even though once I detested the bastards up there, the agents and consultants, money farmers and middle men, parliamentary quango-mongers, local and international monopolists. My books were attacks on these people but caused no hard feelings, and now my books are only read in nations that lost World War Two.

My host spoke on a politely insistent note. “I suggest you visit my country. Your royalties there will easily rent a private apartment with housekeeper and health care. We are no longer a military nation. We revere old people, which is why they live longer among us than anywhere else.”

I said I was happy where I was. He shut his notebook and bowed saying, “You are a true master. You have subdued your wishes to your surroundings.”

This angered me but I did not show it. There are better ways of living than being happy but they require strength and sanity. The poor and weak are as incapable of sanity as the rich and powerful. In this

country sanity would drive the

weak to suicide and make the

rich distinctly uncomfortable.

We are better without it.