Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  A fortnight of hot calm cloudless summer weather had made Glasgow detestable. With no rain to wash it down or breeze to blow it away the industrial smoke and gases hung in a haze filling the valley to the height of the surrounding hills, a gritty haze that put a grey film on everything, even the sky, and prickled under the eyelids, and made crusts in the nostrils. The air seemed cleaner indoors, but one evening a need of exercise took me walking beside a dull stretch of the Kelvin. At one point it fell over a weir which churned effluent from the upstream paper-mill into heaps of filthy green froth, each the size and shape of a lady’s bonnet and divided from its neighbour by a crevice floored with opaque scum. This substance (which looked and stank like the contents of a chemical retort) flowed through the West End Park completely hiding the river under it. I imagined the mixture when it entered the oil-fouled Clyde between Partick and Govan, and wondered if men were the only land beasts who excreted into water. Wishing to think pleasanter thoughts I strolled to the Loch Katrine memorial fountain9 whose up-flung and downward trickling jets gave some freshness to the air. Well-dressed people and their children paraded round it and I moved among them staring at the ground as I usually do in crowds. I tried to remember the colour of Bella’s eyes but was remembering how her syllables sounded like pearls dropping one by one into a dish when she said, “Candle, where are your cord dew roys?”

  She shone before me like a rainbow’s end but solid, tall, elegant, leaning on Baxter’s arm and wistfully smiling. Her eyes were golden brown, her dress crimson silk with a jacket of sky-blue velvet. She wore a purple toque, snow-white gloves and the fingers of her left hand twirled the amber knob of a parasol whose slim shaft, slanting over her shoulders, spun a buttercup-yellow silk dome with a grass-green fringe behind her head. With these colours her black hair and eyebrows, sallow skin and bright golden-brown eyes seemed dazzlingly foreign and right, but if she seemed a glorious dream Baxter loomed beside her like a nightmare. When apart from Baxter my memory always reduced his monstrous bulk and shaggy boyish head to something more probable, so even after a week the unexpected sight of him was shocking. I had not seen him for seventy weeks. He was muffled in the thick cape and overcoat he wore outdoors in every sort of weather, because his body lost heat faster than most people’s, but his face shocked me most. It usually looked unhappy, but now his aghast eyes seemed to reflect an absence of something as essential as sanity or oxygen, an absence that was slowly killing him. There was nothing hostile in this settled gloom—he gave me a nod of dreary recognition—yet it menaced me because for a moment I feared that what he ached for and needed could not be mine either, though Bella was now smiling at me as eagerly and expectantly as in her younger days. She had taken her right hand from under Baxter’s arm and was holding it straight out to me. Again I rose on tiptoe to take her fingers and touch them with my lips.

  “Haha!” she laughed, thrusting the hand above her head as if grasping a butterfly. “He is still my little Candle, God! You were the first man I ever loved after wee Robbie Murdoch, Candle, and now I me Bell Miss Baxter citizen of Glasgow native of Scotland subject of the British Empire have been made a woman of the world! French German Italian Spanish African Asian American men and some women of the north and the south kinds have kissed this hand and other parts but I still dream of the first time though oceans deep between have roared since auld lang syne. Sit on that bench, God. I am taking Candle for a walk saunter stroll dawdle trot canter short gallop and circum-ambu-lation. Poor old God. Without Bella you will grow glum glummer glummest until just when you think I am for ever lost crash bang wallop, out I pop from behind that holly bush. Guard him, lads.”

  She and Baxter were accompanied by five children whose big boots and coarse clothes showed they belonged to the servant or artisan class. If small companions were still a clue to Bella’s brain then her mental age was now between twelve and thirteen. Baxter, with no change of expression, slumped obediently into a space on a crowded bench. From one side of him an army officer hurriedly departed, from the other a nursemaid with a baby that had started to scream. Two of the boys took their places. The rest stood in a row before him, facing outward with legs astride and folded arms. “Good!” said Bella approvingly. “If anyone stares at God stare back until they stop. This will keep you going while I am away.”

  From a poke in her pocket she gave each child a large sweet of the kind called gobstoppers, then drew my hand under her arm and hurried me off past the duck pond.

  Bella’s firm and talkative manner made me expect a torrent of words, not what happened. She strode forward glancing from side to side until she saw a narrow path through a shrubbery and steered me abruptly up it. At a bend in the path she stopped, snapped shut her parasol, hurled it like a spear into a thick rhododendron bush and dragged me in after it. I was too surprised to resist. When the leaves were higher than our heads she released me and unbuttoned her right hand glove, smiling and licking her lips and muttering “Now then!”

  Stripping off the glove she clapped her naked palm over my mouth while flinging her left arm round my neck. The edge of the palm blocked my nostrils and though still too astonished to struggle I was soon gasping for breath. So was she. Her eyes were shut, she wrenched her head from side to side moaning through flushed and pouting lips, “A Candle oh Candle the Candle of Candle to Candle by Candle from Candle I Candle you Candle we Candle . . .”

  From feeling as helpless as a doll I suddenly wished to be nothing else, her pressure on my mouth and neck became terribly sweet, I began struggling not against suffocation but against a delight too great to be borne. A moment later I was free again, dazed and watching her pick the glove from the branch where it hung and pull it on again.

  “Do you know, Candle,” she murmured after some deeply contented sighs, “I haven’t had a chance to do that since I got off the ship from America a fortnight ago? Baxter has not left me alone with anyone except him. Did you enjoy what we did?”

  I nodded. She said slyly, “You didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. You would not have pulled away so soon and would have acted more daft. But men seem better at acting daft when they’re miserable.”

  She retrieved her parasol and cheerfully waved it to some starers on a terrace of the hillside above.10 I was depressed to see we had been overlooked, but relieved to realize the watchers must first have thought she was trying to strangle me then decided she was coping with a bleeding nose.

  When we regained the path she brushed twigs, leaves and petals off our clothing, drew my hand under her arm again and walked onward saying, “What will we talk about?”

  I was too bemused to answer till she had repeated the question.

  “Miss Baxter—Bella—oh dear Bell have you done that with many men?”

  “Yes, all over the world, but mostly in the Pacific. On the boat out of Nagasaki I met two petty officers—they were devoted to each other—and I sometimes did it six times a day with each of them.”

  “Did you . . . do anything more with other men, Bella, than you and me did together in the shrubbery just now?”

  “You rude little Candle! You sound as miserable as God!” said Bella, laughing heartily. “Of course I never do more than we’ve just done with MEN. More with men makes babies. I want fun, not babies. I only do more with women, if I like the look of them, but a lot of women are shy. Miss MacTavish ran away from me in San Francisco because doing more than kissing hands and faces frightened her. I’m glad we can talk straight about these things, Candle. A lot of men are shy too.”

  I told her I was not afraid of straight talking because I was a qualified doctor who had grown up on a farm. I also asked about Miss MacTavish.

  “She was the main part of our cortège retinue ong-to-rage suite train trail or body of retainers when we left Glasgow. She was my teacher escort governess companion instructor chaperon pedagogue duenna guide philosopher and friend until San Francisco. She taught me a lot of words and poetry before the final fracture. You grew up on a farm! Wa
s your dad a frugal swain tending his flocks on the Grampian hills or a ploughman homeward plodding his weary way? Tell tell tell your Bell Bell Bell. I am a collector of childhoods since that collision destroyed all memory of my own.”

  I told her about my parents. When she heard I could not recall where my mother was buried she smiled and nodded though tears started flowing down her cheeks.

  “Me too!” she said. “In Buenos Aires we tried to visit my parents’ grave, but Baxter found the railway company that paid for the interment had put them in a graveyard on the edge of a bottomless canyon, so when Chimborazo or Cotopaxi or Popocatapetl erupted the whole shebang collapsed in an avalanche to the bottom crushing headstones coffins skeletons to a powder of in-fin-it-es-im-al atoms. Seeing them in that state would have been like visiting a heap of caster sugar, so instead Baxter took me to the house where he said I had lived with them. It had a dusty courtyard with a cracked water tank in a corner and some chickens pecking about and an old caretaker janitor gatekeeper porter concierge (stop tinkling Bell) an old man who called me Bella Señorita so I suppose he remembered me but I could not remember him. I stared and stared and stared and stared and stared at those scrawny chickens and that cracked tank with a vine growing out the side and I STROVE to remember them but could not. God knows every language so he questioned the old man in Spanish and I learned I had not lived there long because my pa and ma had been migrants wandering hither and yonder upon the wastes of the waters like the son of man who hath no space whereon to rest the sole of his foot as Miss MacTavish aptly remarked. My pa Ignatius Baxter marketed rubber copper coffee bauxite beef tar esparto-grass all things whose markets fluctuate so he and mama had to fluctuate too. But what I want to know is, what was I DOING while they fluctuated? I have eyes and a mirror in my bedroom, Candle, I SEE I am a woman in my middle twenties and but nearer thirty than twenty, most women are married by then—”

  “Marry me, Bella!” I cried.

  “Don’t change the subject Candle, why were my parents still carting a lovely thing like Bell Baxter about with them? That is what I want to know.”

  We walked on in silence, she obviously brooding upon the mysteries of her origin, I fretting over her neglect of my impulsive but sincere proposal. At last I said, “Bell—Bella—Miss Baxter, I accept the fact that you have done what we did in the shrubbery with many men. Do you ever do it with Godwin?”

  “No. I can’t do it with God, and that’s what is making him miserable. He’s too ordinary to have fun with in that kind of way. He’s as ordinary as I am.”

  “Nonsense, Miss Baxter! You and your guardian are the most extraordinary couple I have ever—”

  “Shut up Candle, you are too impressed by appearances. I have not read Beauty and the Beast or Ruskin’s Stones of Venice or Dumas’ Hunchback of Notre-Dame or is it Hugo’s in the Tauchnitz limp covered English translation costing two shillings and sixpence from start to finish, but I have been told enough about these mighty epics of our race to know most folk think God and me a very gothic couple. They are wrong. At heart we are ordinary farmers like Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by one of those Brontës.”

  “I have not read it.”

  “You must because it is about us. Heathcliff and Cathy belong to a farming family and he loves her because they’ve been together and played together almost forever and she likes him a lot but finds Edgar more lovable and marries him because he is outside the family. Then Heathcliff goes daft. I hope Baxter won’t. There he is, all alone, how very handy. I’m glad he sent the lads home.”

  When we reached the fountain the park-keepers were blowing their whistles before locking the gates and a deep-red sun was sinking behind bars of purple and golden cloud. The solitary bulk of poor Baxter was slumped exactly as we had left him, hands clasped on the knob of a stout stick planted upright between his legs, chin resting on hands, aghast eyes seeming to gaze at nothing. When we stood arm in arm before him our heads were level with his own, yet he still seemed not to see us.

  “Boo!” said Bella. “Do you feel better now?”

  “A little better,” he murmured with an effort at a smile.

  “Good,” said Bella, “because Candle and I are going to get married and you must be happy about that.”

  Then came the most terrifying experience of my life. The only part of Baxter which moved was his mouth. It slowly and silently opened into a round hole bigger than the original size of his head then grew larger still until his head vanished behind it. His body seemed to support a black, expanding, tooth-fringed cavity in the scarlet sunset behind him. When the scream came the whole sky seemed screaming.11 I had clapped my hands to my ears before this happened so did not faint as Bella did, but the single high-pitched note sounded everywhere and pierced the brain like a dental drill piercing a tooth without anaesthetic. I lost most of my senses during that scream. They returned so slowly that I never saw how Baxter came to be kneeling beside Bella’s body, beating the sides of his head with his fists and quivering with human-sounding sobs as he moaned in a husky baritone voice, “Forgive me Bella, forgive me for making you like this.”

  She opened her eyes and said faintly, “What’s that supposed to mean? You aren’t our father which art in Heaven, God. What a silly fuss to make about nothing. Still, your voice has broken, there’s that to be grateful for. Help me up both of you.”

  8

  The Engagement

  As she walked briskly between us from the park, a hand on the arm of each, I knew her instant recovery of health and high spirits must seem callous to Baxter; but though he was the sincerest man I ever met his ordinary new voice made me feel he was putting on an act when he said, “It is agony to find you treating me like a wrecked ship and McCandless like a life-boat, Bell. Your romances on the world tour were bearable because I knew they were transient. For nearly three years I have lived with and for you and wished that never to end.”

  “I am not deserting you, God,” she told him soothingly, “or not right away. Candle is very poor so we’ll both find it handy to live with you for a long time. Turn your father’s old operating-theatre into a drawing-room for us and you will be a welcome guest whenever you call. And of course we will eat with you. But I am a very romantic woman who needs a lot of sex but not from you because you cannot help treating me like a child, and I cannot CAN NOT treat you like one. I am marrying Candle because I can treat him how I like.”

  Baxter looked at me enquiringly. In a slightly ashamed voice I told him that though I had always tried to be a dour, independent sort of man Bella was correct: I had worshipped and longed for her from the moment he introduced us—everything about her seemed to me the acme of womanly perfection—I would gladly endure the most horrible agonies to save her from the smallest inconvenience. I added that Bella would always be able to do whatever she wanted with me.

  Said Bella, “And Candle’s kisses are almost as strong as your yells, God, and would make me faint too if I was not a grown-up woman.”

  Baxter nodded his head rapidly for several seconds then said, “I will help you both to do whatever you want but first please grant me one favour, a favour which may save my life. Do not see each other for a fortnight. Give me fourteen days to strengthen myself for the loss of you, Bell. I know you mean to keep me as a friendly convenience but you cannot foresee how marriage may change you, Bell—nobody can. Please grant me this. Please!”

  His lips trembled, his mouth seemed shaping for another outcry, so we hurriedly agreed. I doubted if he could have screamed a second time as loudly as the first, but I feared that another sudden enlargement of his oral cavity would disconnect his spine and cranium.

  Baxter stood with his back to us as we said good-bye under a street lamp. Bell murmured, “A fortnight for me is years and years and years.”

  I told her I would write to her every day, and taking a tiny pearl mounted on a pin from the knot of my necktie I told her it was the only pretty thing, and the most expensive thing, I owned,
and asked if she would keep it with her for ever and ever and think of me whenever she saw or touched it. She nodded her head violently seven or eight times, so I stuck it into the lapel of her jacket and told her this meant we were engaged to be married. I then begged her to give me her glove or scarf or handkerchief, any token whose texture or scent had been close to her person, making it a sacred relic of the covenant between us. She frowned thoughtfully then gave me the poke of gobstoppers saying, “Take the lot.”

  I saw that to her still developing brain this was a noble sacrifice so there were tears in my eyes as I pressed my lips to the kidskin sheaths on her fingertips. I nearly put my lips to her lips, then remembered that if my mouth on her naked fingers nearly made her faint it would be wiser to wait for total privacy before I grew more ardent. Yet I hurried away enraptured by the wonderful adventure of living. If Baxter’s scream had been my most terrifying experience this moment was my sweetest. I was already devising phrases for the love-letter I would write when I got to my lodgings. I knew Baxter hoped that a fortnight apart from me would change her mind, but I had no fear of losing her because I knew he would submit her to no unkind pressure, would do nothing sneaking or dishonest. I also believed he could protect her from other men.

  I performed my hospital duties in an absent-minded way for nearly a week. My imagination had awakened. The imagination is, like the appendix, inherited from a primitive epoch when it aided the survival of our species, but in modern scientific industrial nations it is mainly a source of disease. I had prided myself on lacking one, but it had only lain dormant. I now did what people expected of me but without rigour or enthusiasm, because I was composing love-letters in my head when not scribbling them down and running out to post them. I discovered that I possessed a strong poetic faculty. All my memories and hopes of Bella became rhyming sentences so easily that I often felt I was not composing them but remembering them from a previous existence. Here is a specimen: