Unlikely Stories Mostly

by Alasdair Gray

  I must have managed the lift intelligently for I came down in shallow water near a ridge of rocks, a shore of the new sea. I sat a long time on those rocks, sometimes howling, sometimes weeping, always staring at the waves which drowned everything I knew and will drown it forever. I tried to think of a reason for living and failed, but life is too strong to need reasons. Next day two quite new sensations, hunger and loneliness, made me walk until I met a tribe of nomads. They have strange notions of hygiene but are otherwise tolerant and generous. When I had learned their language they valued my ability to exactly weigh, measure and record their herds and produce. I now have sons who are keen to learn arithmetic but refuse to learn, and will certainly never read, the language of the axletree. The older tribesmen know something about the axletree but the knowledge confuses them. They prefer to forget it. Yet I am the man who touched the sky! And when I try explaining this to my boys, because sons should admire fathers, the younger nudges the elder who says, “Did you visit the sun too? Did you stand on it, Dad? Was it hot?”

  A week ago we pitched tents below a rocky cliff. Broken columns stood before the entrance to a ravine, which I explored. It led to a marble block carved with these words in the language of the old empire:

  OZYMANDIAS

  3D EMPEROR OF THE GREAT WHEEL

  RECEIVED

  FROM

  GOD

  IN

  THE CAVERN

  BEHIND

  THIS STONE

  THE

  PLAN

  OF THE

  AXLETREE

  LOOK ON HIS WORK YE MIGHTY

  AND DESPAIR

  The block has a crack the width of my finger between the top edge and the granite rock above. Tests with a stick show that the sheepskin on which I write this account can be slid through to fall in the cave behind. The marble is too vast to be moved by any but administrative people commanding a large labour-force to satisfy idle curiosity, so unless there is a shattering earthquake my history will not be found till the next world empire is established. Many centuries will pass before that happens, because tribes dispersed round a central sea will take longer to unify. But mere love-making and house-keeping, mere increase of men will bring us all together again one day, though I suppose ruling castes will speed the business by organising invasion and plunder. So when unity is achieved the accumulation of capital which created the first great tower will lead to another, or to something very similar.

  But men are not completely sheeplike. Their vanity ensures that they never exactly repeat the past, if they know what it is. So if you have understood this story you had better tell it to others.

  A UNIQUE CASE

  The Reverend Dr Phelim MacLeod is a healthy, boyish-looking bachelor who has outlived all his relations except a distant cousin in Canada. Though unsurpassed in his knowledge of Latin, Hebrew and Greek his main reading since retirement has been detective stories, but he can still beat me at the game of chess we play at least once a fortnight. I tell you this to indicate his apparent normality before the accident last year. A badly driven, badly stacked glazier’s van crashed beside his garden gate as he walked out of it, and a fragment of glass sheered off a section of skull with his right ear on it. I am his closest friend. At the Royal Infirmary I heard that no visitors could be allowed to see him in his present state, but I would be called if it changed.

  I was called a week later. The brain surgeon in charge of him said, ‘Dr MacLeod has regained consciousness. We are providing him with peace, privacy and a well-balanced diet. His unique constitution makes it impossible for us to do more.’ “But is he recovering?”

  “I think so. Judge for yourself. And please tell him nothing about his appearance that would needlessly disturb him.”

  In a small ward of his own I found Dr MacLeod propped up in bed reading one of his detective thrillers. He greeted me with his usual calm, self-satisfied smile. I asked how he felt.

  “Very well,” he said. “You are interested in my wound, I see. How does it look? The staff here are less than informative.”

  In war films I had seen many buildings with an outer wall missing and the side of my friend’s head resembled one. Through a big opening I saw tiny rooms with doors, light fittings and wall sockets, all empty of furniture but with signs of hasty evacuation. There was also scaffolding and heaps of building material suggesting that repair was in progress. I said hesitantly, “You seem to be mending quite well.”

  Dr MacLeod smiled complacently and pointed out that he would be seventy-six on his next birthday. I asked if he had any pain.

  “No pain but a deal of inconvenience. I am forbidden to move my head and am sometimes wakened at night by hammering noises inside it. I sleep best during the day.”

  After chatting with him about the weather and our acquaintances I returned to the surgeon’s office. I told him that my friend seemed surprisingly fit for a man in his condition and asked who was responsible for the improvement.

  “Agents,” said the surgeon slowly, “who seem to inhabit the undamaged parts of his anatomy, only emerging to operate on him when nobody is looking – nobody like us, I mean. I am carefully keeping students and younger doctors away from this case. Mere curiosity might lead them to kill your friend by delving into what they understand as little as I do.” “There are obviously more things in heaven and earth,” I said, “than are dreamed of in your …” The surgeon interrupted testily, saying every experienced medical practitioner knew that better than Shakespeare. A year seldom passed without them encountering at least one inexplicable case. A hospital he would not name recently treated a woman, otherwise normal, for panic attacks caused by her certainty that a sudden shock would crack her into a million pieces. When every other therapy had failed a psychiatrist, thinking a practical demonstration might work, suddenly tripped her so that she fell on a padded surface which could not have injured a child, and she had cracked into a million pieces. “With tact,” said the surgeon, “your friend’s case may have a happier conclusion.”

  It did. A month later the wound had been closed. Skin grew over it, a new ear, also a few strands of the white hair which elsewhere surrounds Dr MacLeod’s bald pink dome. He returned home and we meet once more for regular chess games. His character seems in no way changed by the accident. I am sometimes tempted to tell him that he is worked from inside by smaller people and always refrain in case it spoils his play. But maybe it would have no effect at all. Like many Christians he believes that a healthy body is a gift from God, no matter how it works. And like most men he has always thought himself unique.

  INCHES IN A COLUMN

  I read this story many years ago in a newspaper. It had no big headline and filled very few inches but I cannot forget it.

  A London lawcourt sentenced a man to several years’ imprisonment because, not for the first time, he had been found guilty of getting money by false pretences. Handcuffed to a policeman he was driven to the yard of a London gaol; there the cuff round the policeman’s wrist was unlocked before being attached to a warder’s. At that moment our man broke free and ran through the yard gateway which was still open. In the road outside a taxi stood at traffic lights which were about to change. Our man leapt in giving the name of an expensive hotel. The cab accelerated. He was free.

  Though the paper did not say so I suspect this sequence took less than a minute and he entered the taxi with pursuers close behind. If they saw the taxi drive off the story is certainly from days before taxis had radios. Not till later that afternoon had the driver reason to think anything was wrong.

  Our man’s position was this: he was penniless with the police in pursuit of him and a right hand he must keep in his pocket to hide the handcuffs locked to its wrist. He was being driven without luggage to the Ritz or Dorchester or Royal Hilton by someone who would expect payment. If he jumped out at lights before reaching the hotel the driver also would start chasing him. His only advantage was a voice and manner which persuaded folk he was rich.


  On the way to the hotel he asked if the driver had other business that day. The driver said no. Our man said, good, in that case he would hire the cab for the afternoon, but first they must have lunch. They entered the hotel where our man told the cabby (who probably wore the peaked cap worn by most London cabbies and chauffeurs in those days) to sit down in the foyer lounge. He then went to the reception counter, gave a false but impressive name, booked a room for the week and explained that his luggage would arrive from abroad later that afternoon. He was very particular in ordering a room facing the quiet side of the hotel and in arranging that a hot-water bottle be put in his bed at 11.30 exactly, since he would soon be going out and might return late. Meanwhile he ordered for himself and his driver a snack lunch of sandwiches and champagne to be served in the foyer lounge, also a racing newspaper. The waiter who served the champagne would also naturally pour the first glass so our man was able to eat and drink with his left hand only. He asked the cabby to look through the paper and tell him what races were on that afternoon. The fact that he asked others to do everything for him must have made him a more convincing member of the British officer class. He decided to be driven to Epsom or Ascot or Goodwood – I cannot remember the racecourse, perhaps the report I read failed to mention it. On the journey there he borrowed money from the driver, saying he would cash a cheque later, and in the crowd at the races he managed to lose the driver in a way that seemed accidental.

  But the police knew his methods of work and had phoned hotels until they found the one where he had booked a room. His order of a racing paper gave a clue to his destination. When two plain-clothes policemen suddenly grabbed him in the crowd he played his last trick. Pulling his right hand from his pocket he waved the cuff locked to his wrist in the air by its chain and in commanding tones shouted to everyone around, “I am a police officer! Help! Help me arrest these criminals!”

  The trick did not work. Our man was again brought to court where a judge added more time to his first jail sentence. The taxi driver, appearing as witness, said his day with the swindler had been one of the pleasantest in his life.

  Were I writing this story as fiction I might imagine the driver saying that but would leave it out. Such details are too sentimental for convincing fiction.

  The whole incident tells a lot about the British class system but hints at something greater. Sooner or later most of us find life a desperate effort to postpone meeting the foe who will one day catch and shut us up forever. I prefer the reckless and witty hero of this short story to more famous confidence men who are sometimes praised, sometimes blamed but always celebrated in longer newspaper articles, and official biographies, and history books.

  I hope he thoroughly enjoyed his last taste of champagne.

  A LIKELY STORY

  OUTSIDE

  A DOMESTIC SETTING

  “Listen, you owe me an explanation. We’ve had such great times together – you’re beautiful – you know I love you – and now you don’t want to see me again. Why? Why?”

  “Jings, you take everything very seriously.”

  A LIKELY STORY

  WITHIN

  A DOMESTIC SETTING

  “Fuck who you like but the rent is overdue and the electricity is going to be cut off and we’ve no food and the baby is hungry.”

  “Our love once meant much more to me than money so I’m not giving you any.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Dr Philip Hobsbaum helped write the poem near the end of Five Letters From An Eastern Empire. A third of Logopandocy is edited from pamphlets Sir Thomas Urquhart published when imprisoned in the Tower of London, with additional phrases from the Earl of Clarendon, John Milton, Edward Philips, John Aubrey and Malcolm Hood; also some Greek neologisms devised by Janet Sisson. Tina Reid let parts of her letters be used in Prometheus. A Likely Story Outside A Domestic Setting is from a reminiscence by Jim Hutcheson, and half of the story within one from a poem by Fred Humble. Both the Axletree stories and Five Letters are decorative expansions of what Kafka outlined perfectly in The City Coat of Arms and The Great Wall of China.

  Illustrations in this book are drawn from work by Paul Klee, Michelangelo, Raphael, Piranesi, G. Glover, W. Blake, Ε. Η. Shepherd and a Japanese artist whose name has no agreed phonetic equivalent in Roman type. Doreen and Russel Logan kindly allowed their portraits to be used in the scurrilous context of the last two likely stories.

  The complicated parts of the book were made possible by the exact typing of Donald Goodbrand Saunders and Scott Pearson, by the free use of John McInespie’s photocopying machine, by the bibliographic skill of Jim Hutcheson, and the patience of

  John Hewer, the typesetter.

  Author’s Postscript Completed by Douglas Gifford

  The notion of writing a story book struck me at the age of nine or maybe earlier because for what seemed a long time I meant to astonish the reading public by getting it published before I was twelve. Unluckily everything I wrote before the age of sixteen was obviously the work of a child or pretentious adolescent. I knew this by comparing it with Hans Andersen’s tales. These were as fantastic as I wanted my own to be, but contained pains and losses too strong to be doubted. ‘The Star’ was my first story which did not seem silly when compared with (for instance) Andersen’s ‘Drop of Ditch water’.

  It was also the first story written in a gust of what felt like inspiration. The critic Leavis suggests that inspiration is unconscious memory – that well-made writing only comes without effort when authors instinctively adapt work by earlier writers. Two decades passed before I noticed ‘The Star’ had been inspired by H. G. Wells’s story ‘The Crystal Egg’, in which the henpecked owner of a seedy little curio shop finds consolation in a lens which allows glimpses of life on another planet. He dies while hiding it from potential purchasers and his rapacious wife. My (unconscious) imagination easily turned this poor man into a lonely child in a bleak Glasgow tenement, his wife into a teacher. I then lived in what I thought was a middle-class tenement and had mainly friendly teachers, but felt a more painful life than mine more likely to interest readers. One advantage ‘The Star’ has over ‘The Crystal Egg’ is terseness. My tale of an obscure hero trying to keep a magic gift was hardly two pages; Wells used about a dozen. I did not know how my tale would end before describing the teacher demand the magic gift. It resembled one of those coloured glass balls Scots children call bools or jinkies, English children call marbles. Had I made the teacher treat it as that the reader might suppose all the magic was in the boy’s imagination and therefore unreal. Since every human invention, religion and institution was first imagined I disliked stories that reduced imagination to delusion so was pleased and astonished to find three last sentences that left the star as real as the teacher. I suspect they were inspired by the endings of ‘The Little Match Girl’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’.

  My plan to publish at the age of twelve was the first of many failed literary plans. A later one led to the title of this collection.

  In 1981 I was forty-six years old. My first novel had been published by Canongate of Edinburgh. I was finishing a book for the same firm to be called Unlikely Stories, Mostly. It would contain (I thought) all the short narratives I had ever written in the order of writing them and use every known literary form: tales of mystery and imagination, love stories, comic lectures, diary, film-script, autobiography. But fantasies would outnumber the other sorts, hence the title. This plan was upset because one of the most realistic stories (a monologue by a middle-aged alcoholic electrician) expanded into an unintended second novel called 1982 Janine. At my publisher’s suggestion the remaining probable stories were also omitted for use in yet another book. They became the nucleus of Lean Tales, a collection eventually shared with James Kelman and Agnes Owens. But being fond of the title Unlikely Stories, Mostly I forged an excuse for the third word by inserting, at the last possible moment, two nasty wee likely tales about the course of a love affair. And thus the collection was printed a
nd reprinted for fourteen years until this Canongate Classics edition.

  To boost it I have inserted two stories more: ‘A Unique Case’ and ‘Inches in a Column’. The first was written in 1954 or ’55 for Cleg, a Glasgow art student magazine of one number edited by James Spence. Printed by a stencil process on flimsy paper, all copies seemed to have vanished until a friend of mine found one in a second-hand bookshop a few months ago. It is printed here with a few improvements suggested by the passage of forty and more years. ‘Inches in a Column’ was written in 1994. It seem highly unlikely but is true to a factual newspaper report on which I based it.

  From ‘The Star’ to ‘Inches in a Column’ I see all my writing is about personal imagination and social power, or (to put it more crudely) freedom and government. Variety comes from neither side being simply right or wrong. Both are essential. This is as true of ‘The Problem’, ‘The Comedy of the White Dog’ and ‘Prometheus’, in which freedom and control are swapped between two individuals.