The Red Door (36 page)

‘Who the effing hell are you?’ he said.

‘This is . . . what’s your name?’ she whispered urgently.

‘Jimmy.’

‘His name is Jimmy, Father.’

‘Got any drink with you, Jimmy?’

‘Sorry, I . . . ’

‘Oh Christ!’ The man went into a room and slammed the door behind him.

‘Is that your father?’ Jimmy whispered.

‘Yes.’

He nearly said, What’s a famous scientist like him doing here? but looked at her and decided not to. There isn’t any room for his test tubes, he thought, or a laboratory or anything.
He nearly burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all.

‘Come with me,’ she said and they entered what might have been a bedroom or a cell. There was no furniture at all except for a bed with clothes piled on top of it.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said. ‘I can get you a cup of tea.’ He said, ‘That would be nice,’ and sat down on the bed looking at the bare floor. He
went over to the window and looked at the pools of scummy green water in the yard. A small boy was peeing into one of them.

After a while she came back with two jam jars of tea. The tea looked thick and black.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there’s no milk. My mother, though she’s highly intelligent, plays Patience a lot and sometimes forgets about things. Do you like
Patience?’

‘No,’ he said though he had never played. He heard a crash from another room and somebody swearing. Perhaps one of the experiments had gone wrong. He took one of her hands in his and
using the other to hold his jam jar drank his tea. It was without question the most horrible tea he had ever drunk in his life. It was so bad he couldn’t believe it was tea, but on the other
hand he didn’t know what else it could be. She sat watching him while he drank it.

‘It’s quite good tea, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There’s a wee shop near here. I don’t like supermarkets. Are you really going to marry me?’ she said.
‘Let’s go and ask Father.’

‘Do you have to have your father’s permission?’

‘I would like it.’

‘All right then.’ He got up, squaring his shoulders, to meet the scientist in his den. He left the room and knocked on the door of the adjoining room.

‘What the effing hell do you want?’ said the voice of the famous scientist.

He went in. The place was a chaos of unwashed dishes, cardboard boxes, bottles, eggshells, cans, altogether a blizzard of detritus. In the middle of it all sat the bullnecked father in a
broken-springed chair watching a TV screen which seemed, like himself, rather unshaven.

‘Sir,’ said Jimmy above the roar of the TV, ‘I should like to marry your daughter.’

‘Bugger off.’

‘Sir, I know I haven’t known her long but . . . ’

‘I said bugger off.’

Jimmy retired. She was waiting for him when he went into the room.

‘What did he say?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ he said and then burst out laughing so hard that he got a pain in his stomach. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he just told me to leave. That was all. He was watching the
TV.’

‘Yes, he watches TV a lot. That’s how he relaxes. But it’ll be all right, you see. When you get to know him better you will realise that he’s very sensitive.’

The curve of her neck had infinite pathos. It had the same shape as the moon he had seen when lying on the grass near the fair.

‘I love you so much,’ he said stroking her hair.

‘And I love you too. Very much,’ she said. ‘From the moment I saw you sitting on the bench with your guitar.’

The darkness came down but there seemed to be no electric switch in the room. Her pale face descended into the darkness and was replaced by the sweet curve of the moon. He touched her face in
the darkness and it was wet with tears. He began to play gently on his guitar,

‘As we cam in by Glesca toun . . . ’

When he had finished playing they sat together on the bed, hands clasped. He knew that he would never leave her and that he would marry her. He was quite helpless. There was nothing else he
could do. He tousled her hair and suddenly burst out laughing.

‘We’ll get married and have three chairs.’

‘Children, you mean,’ she said seriously.

‘We need chairs more,’ he said. And at that moment he was astonished to discover how free he was and knew for the first time the meaning of the songs he had been singing and why he
had always kept his guitar in spite of everything.

‘And your father really is a scientist,’ he said laughing, listening to the roar of the TV.

‘He has the mind of a scientist,’ she said.

He held her so tightly that she cried out. ‘Not a bloody switch in the place,’ he thought and when he heard the TV set screaming again he shouted out, ‘Bugger off, you old
bastard.’

‘You shouldn’t say things like that to my father,’ she said, ‘he’s very sensitive. He’s been hurt by the world and he’s got the mind of a
scientist.’

He lay for a long time in the thickening darkness thinking, ‘It’s quite inescapable.’ And then he thought, ‘When it’s inescapable, it’s easy.’ The first
thing, he thought, is to take her away from the scientist and the brilliant mother (come to that, he hadn’t seen her) and then things would be all right. He knew without looking that she was
already asleep.

At first when he had got the job he had been very pleased to tell them everything he knew, how the stone huts had been unearthed by an archaeologist who had come up from the
south. He would point from the little brae above to the stone enclosures where the little people had slept, presumably after telling each other stories in the flickering light of the flames, the
passageways down which they had crawled, the stone cupboards. It was rather like being a teacher and on top of that he had a blue uniform with yellow facings. He was an important man, people
listened to him with respect, even with deference, he was the oracle which would at regular intervals emit information to the shallow and the rich and the voyaging. They came from all over,
Germans, Dutch, Americans, Canadians, the visitors’ book was an incomprehensible record of strange foreign names. They were properly astonished by what he told them and then they departed,
taking with them some of the coloured postcards which he sold. He told them of the three skeletons which had been found, of the bone needles, the deer and the shellfish.

But that was of course before he had actually seen the little people, the first night he had remained behind, tired, staring out at the sea with the marks of the tourists’ feet still on
the sand, and their boyish splashings still in his ears. He liked looking out at the sea, with its large white waves, rising and falling, dissipating themselves in unravelling threads along the
shoreline, the sun setting like a red head above the water.

At first he heard only whispers below him, an unintelligible quick susurration like the sudden hastening important whispering of children, and then he saw them, very small people, with long
matted hair and furrowed brows. They were gathered together by the fire which had miraculously bloomed, wearing their tatty ageing skins, chattering among each other. There were little children,
babies as well as adults, and in the light of the fire they seemed oddly vulnerable and almost brittle. All the time they were talking they were touching each other, gesturing furiously, belching,
scratching themselves, looking around them. Once he saw one of them going over to a small compartment near the main room and sitting down to defecate with a serious strained face. It was almost but
not quite like watching monkeys in the zoo clinging to the wire netting and holding out their tiny flesh-coloured fingers.

Eventually they went to bed and in the morning they rose again. The talking and whispering recommenced and they ate what appeared to be the remains of fish. They then came up to the level, went
down to the seashore and began scrabbling for mussels and whelks which they found clamped to the rocks. Others went to a neighbouring spring for water. One was passing a bone needle through a piece
of mangy old fur. It was strange to see them there at his feet, like little dirty mechanical dwarfs, unplugging the helmeted mussels from the bare sea-washed rocks, occupied at their domestic
tasks.

Later he saw the deer coming down to feed on the grass. It was a beautiful, elegant animal, composed and fine-looking against the sky. It would bend down and eat and then raise its head,
sniffing the air: perhaps the wind did not blow from the small smelly people: in any case it did not seem to know that they were there. He saw two of them detaching themselves with stones in what
appeared to be leather thongs, quietly crawling and keeping windward of the deer and for a moment they appeared to him to be animals themselves diminishing to the size of weasels as they drew away.
The deer grazed, lifted its head and grazed again. Suddenly the two little men stood up, the stones sped from their slings and hit the deer in the middle of the brow beneath its antlers. Its legs
folded beneath it and they rushed forward making incomprehensible triumphant sounds. The other little people rushed forward shouting; there was dancing round the deer and then a stabbing at it with
sharp bones, while the area in which it lay became red. They dragged it, shouting and dancing, into the maze of passages and began to hack its head off. Pieces of flesh were detached and put on the
fire which bloomed again. They began to eat, rawly tearing at the flesh with their hands. In the vast sea behind them, intensely calm, he saw what appeared to be a cormorant diving into the water
and emerging yards away. A woman gave her breasts to a child.

They were very happy now, talking and dancing and singing. Their hands were red with blood and they ran them now and then casually through their matted hair: on their necks were necklaces of
shellfish.

He wanted to be with them: he wanted to enjoy himself among them. They seemed so happy and he himself was so lonely. He wanted to be noticed, to bring himself to their attention, but he
couldn’t see how this might be. He looked back at the coloured postcards which were sold to the tourists and which were racked in their wire cage. He took some of the postcards out and
without thinking scattered them below him, letting them drift like snowflakes along the passageways, above the beds, the fire. They swirled out of the air on random curves. The little people looked
up at the postcards and moved away from them, crouching in corners, chattering and frightened. The postcards drifted down and lay flat on the ground, in the silence which occurred after the
chattering was over.

After a long while, when the postcards were dead, the little people began to come out of their corners. One of them tentatively put his hand towards one of the postcards, then drew it back
without touching it as if his hand had been burnt. He remained like that for a long time, watching it as a cat might watch a mouse or a mouse a cat. Looking down from above, he himself felt a
terrible pity for the little men and at the same time an impatience. Why don’t you pick it up, he was mouthing silently. Prove yourself a hero. Advance. He didn’t exactly articulate
these words but obscurely he felt some such feelings as might be conveyed by them. Slowly the little man’s hand advanced. He touched the postcard this time and then quickly withdrew the hand.
The others were all looking at it with bared teeth. Eventually he made a little rush at it and held it. It was harmless, it was dead. Nothing exploded from it. He held it up so that the others
could see it. They rushed forward and looked at it. They turned it over and over in their clumsy hands. They held it up to the light. Others picked up other postcards. He noticed that the man who
had got it did not wish to keep it but was willing to let the others handle it as well. They made sounds indicative of wonder but clearly didn’t recognise any of the patterns though they were
looking at a representation of their own world. They were amazed at the colours more than anything, he thought, the bright reds, the blues, the greens. More and more of them were picking up
postcards and looking at them, turning them over and over, their brows knitted. They would look at them for a while and then turn away to look at something else. Their span of attention seemed very
limited. One turned to look at a bird that was flying in the blue picture frame above. Sometimes they would drop their postcards and eat some of the deer: at other times they might go off to
urinate. Eventually one of them tore his postcard by accident and there was a howl of what might have been fear. They withdrew from him looking down at the small pieces which lay on the ground and
he himself, appalled, stared down at the dismembered paper. They gestured at him from a distance and he moved away from the pieces, delicately, fearfully, as if they would suddenly join and eat
him. No one went near them for a long time.

Eventually some laid the postcards down, others put them inside their hide-covered breasts, others tried to taste them. And one or two studied them all the time, looking at the colours and
making little crows of wonder, touching them very gently and not bending them, though at first many had been bent and one at least had been torn.

Matches felt a great excitement moving in him as strongly and with as much suffocating power as the waves of the sea which was not so very far away. He could not imagine what this excitement was
but it seemed like a freeing inside himself, a sluicing, a liberation from forces such as his parents, his bingo-playing gross wife, the tenements with their smell of cats, the tourists who were
his masters in life though he was their master in information. He wanted to do something more exciting than this. In a confused way he wanted to see the little people win, he wanted to see them
become men, he wanted to see them painfully and unwillingly and with joy fly upwards from their passageways and their bone needles and take off, beautiful and intelligent, to their equivalent of
the moon. He wanted to offer them a present.

They were quieter now, looking at the postcards, turning them over and over as if there was something there that they wanted to know about but that at the same time they sensed they were
incapable of knowing, because of the screen in front of their minds which would not slide aside, which would not open. One of them scratched his face with the edge of one of the postcards to keep
the midges away.