1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  The catfood man said, “Don’t judge him too harshly. He has just realised that his chance of promotion is rather slim.”

  The brewery man said, “I thought there might be something like that behind it. What did you think, Jock?”

  These people like to call me Jock. They would be pleased if I used their nicknames but I never call them anything. Breweries and catfood knew I came from folk who owned almost nothing so, “That young chap has a lot to learn. I’m referring to manners … What do you think, Jock?” and they watched my reaction. I finished my whisky with a thoughtful frown, tapped breweries on the shoulder with a forefinger and said, “I think I’ll buy us a drink. What do you want?”

  54 LACT LIKE A SYCOPHANT

  He stared at me, guffawed, then slapped me on the back. He said, “Jock, I suspect you are a bit of a bolshie. I’ll have a bloody big brandy, if you don’t mind.”

  For a moment I was glad to have restored good feeling without sounding like a sycophant, then I noticed I had sounded like a sycophant. Breweries would soon be telling his colleagues, “I had a dram last week with old Jock of the National Security crowd. He’s a bit of a bolshie but he’s utterly dependable and knows his job thoroughly. And he’s no sycophant, thank God.” My offer of a drink had reassured him, as it was meant to do. Why are men in strong positions such gluttons for reassurance? They can never have enough of it. They control almost everything yet they want to be admired and loved because they are also jolly good fellows. Well, to those who have shall be given and I bought the bastard a brandy and a Glenlivet Malt for myself. Breweries said thoughtfully, “It might become profitable to improve our pubs if the customer started boycotting them to drink at home. But you know how incapable the average Scot is of enjoying the company of his wife.”

  As this was supposed to be a joke catfood chuckled and I frowned and nodded once. I am not supposed to have a sense of humour. It amuses those above me to see how little humour I have. It intimidates them slightly too, and my self-respect is founded on that. And I prefer hobnobbing with bastards under bright lights to skulking in the shadow with beaten dogs. But I dislike the bastards as much as I despise the dogs and I don’t care for myself much. I am a Conservative because I like bright lights. But I can do without them. Death won’t frighten me.

  I once met another man of my type, a sergeant in the Argylls who played the pipes for banquets in the officers’ mess. He told me queer stories of these officers’ antics when the ceremonial part of the evening broke down: twenty drunk men in glazed shirtfronts, bumfreezer jackets and tight tartan breeks forming a human pyramid to discover if the youngest had the courage to climb to the top and unscrew the bulbs of a chandelier thirty feet above a stone-flagged floor; with even dafter homosexual antics of a sort I thought were only practised in the more eccentric Masonic lodges. This piper was a solid quietspoken man so the officers trusted him and suggested he should train to be an officer too. In Britain this suggestion is not often made to one of lower ranks. The piper refused it. The training would have cost nothing, but he could not have afforded to follow the customs of the officers’ mess where the lower officers are supposed to buy drinks for their seniors, but not the other way round. New officers cannot afford to be jolly decent chaps if they have only their wages to live upon. And I was suddenly reminded of something told me by a bus conductor in the days when bus-drivers and conductors were different people. The driver was better paid, being more highly skilled, yet there was a tradition that good conductors looked after’ their drivers by buying them pie-suppers and bottles of lemonade. Who spread the story that the Scots are an INDEPENDENT people? Robert Burns.

  55 WHO SAID WERE INDEPENDENT

  Is there, for honest poverty

  That hangs his head, and a’ that?

  The coward-slave, we pass him by–

  We dare be poor for a’ that!

  For a’ that, and a’ that,

  Our toils obscure and a’ that,

  The rank is but the guinea’s stamp –

  The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

  The truth is that we are a nation of arselickers, though we disguise it with surfaces: a surface of generous, openhanded manliness, a surface of dour practical integrity, a surface of futile maudlin defiance like when we break goalposts and windows after football matches on foreign soil and commit suicide on Hogmanay by leaping from fountains in Trafalgar Square. Which is why, when England allowed us a referendum on the subject, I voted for Scottish self-government. Not for one minute did I think it would make us more prosperous, we are a poor little country, always have been, always will be, but it would be a luxury to blame ourselves for the mess we are in instead of the bloody old Westminster parliament. “We see the problems of Scotland in a totally different perspective when we get to Westminster,” a Scottish M.P. once told me. Of course they do, the arselickers.

  56 REFERENDUM

  Well, a majority of the Scots voted as I did, even though politicians from both big parties appeared on television and told us that a separate assembly would lead to cuts in public spending, loss of business and more unemployment. But the usual sporting rules for electing a new government had been changed. “If you win the race by a short head you will have lost it,” we were told, so we won by a short head and lost the race. Then came cuts in public spending, loss of business and increased unemployment and now Westminster has decided to spend the North Sea oil revenues building a fucking tunnel under the English Channel. If we ran that race again we would win by a head and neck so we won’t be allowed to run it again, cool down cool down you are goading yourself into a FRENZY my friend, think about fucking Superb, think about fucking Janine, don’t think about fucking POLITICS.

  “You sound like a Conservative sometimes,” says Sontag and I nearly smiled. But if I had told her the truth about my politics she would have spent hours trying to convert me and I was having a hard enough time protecting my fantasies from her. If she succeeded in connecting them to ordinary life she would make me feel responsible for every atrocity from Auschwitz and Nagasaki to Vietnam and the war in Ulster and I REFUSE TO FEEL GUILTY ABOUT EVERYTHING. Thinking is a pain because it joins everything together until my mother father Mad Hislop Jane Russell mushroomcloud miniskirt tight jeans Janine dead friend Helen Superb Sontag editor sad lesbian police Big Momma and the whore under the bridge surround me all proving that I am a bad man, I am what is wrong with the world, I am a tyrant, I am a weakling, I never gave what they wanted, I grabbed all I could get. So I did not smile, I groaned and said, “Forget politics, Sontag, and let us get back to sex. You are such an expert in sex, Sontag.”

  57 CUNNILINGUS

  This was untrue. She had read a lot about sex and liked to practise very complicated gymnastic couplings which struck me as more bother than they were worth and made her very angry with my incompetence, but what she enjoyed most was being upside down in an armchair with her legs spread wide over the back while I stood behind it working on her cunt with my tongue. It was a position which allowed me the least possible body contact and did not excite me at all, though I could do it for what seemed like hours while she hung on to the chairarms looking ecstatic and moaning softly to herself. Then we would cuddle in bed while I told her my dirty story. She said, “How can I forget politics when your fantasy has such a convincing political structure?”

  “I have other fantasies which are completely unconvincing, completely impossible.”

  “Tell me one.”

  I told her about a Miss World beauty contest whose final adjudication is to take place in Thailand. The hundred most beautiful girls from every country on the globe are travelling there in a jetplane which is hijacked by order of an Arab oil sheik and brought down in his private airfield. The girls are then forced to give a beauty parade without those hideous one-piece bathingsuits they normally wear, and twenty queens are chosen by an examination based on more than eyesight. As I described it Sontag grew excited and for once we had a passionate, un
complicated little fuck together.

  “Yes,” she said afterward, “it was satisfying to think of the stupid bitches who compete in that sort of contest getting what they deserve, but semi-prostitution followed by real abduction has always been commonplace and the other details came from the everyday news. Your only original touch is the scale of the operation. What a lot of sex you have gone without to have to think of such things.”

  58 BROTHEL POLITICS

  But I had not told her the whole story. While the twenty winning queens are enjoyed in a harem by the sheik and his four sons, the eighty losers must serve the queens as slaves. The queens are allowed to wear as much jewellery as they like and a single garment. Miniskirts abound. The slaves go naked but are allowed cosmetics and time to make themselves attractive, for if one of the men grows tired of a queen he can replace her by stripping her skirt off and bestowing it on any slave who excites his fancy. The privileges of being a queen, the pains of being a slave are so exotic that the naked girls are continually competing for the masters’ attention, while the clothed live in fear of the naked and humiliate them to make them less attractive. The dominant men find this entertaining. Probably big harems were organised like that and certainly most societies are, were organised like that and certainly most societies are, thank God I now belong to those who are in no danger of being stripped. In my Beauties of the World harem the sheik’s youngest son falls in love with Miss Poland to the exclusion of everyone else. She uses her power over him to get weapons and arm the other girls for a breakout, slaves and queens alike, but the plan is betrayed by three of the queens. Miss England thinks nice girls should not handle guns, Miss Russia thinks men are too clever to be defeated, Miss America finds life in the harem more interesting and exciting than elsewhere. The sheik’s son suddenly finds Miss America’s eagerly compliant stance more enticing than Miss Poland’s defiant one so Miss Poland is stripped and punished to warn and entertain the others. If I had told Sontag that she would have certainly seen I was Conservative.

  Yet her question sticks in my head, “What makes you invent such despicable villains?” There is a mystery here which makes no sense to me. I am attracted by most of the women I meet, I fear and despise most of the men, I have had only one friend of my own sex in the world yet I am excited by fantasies of worlds where men have total control. My job may be a cause of this. Everyone sees life through their job. To the doctor the world is a hospital, to the broker it is a stock exchange, to the lawyer a vast criminal court, to the soldier a barracks and area of manoeuvre, to the farmer soil and bad weather, to truck-drivers a road system, to dustmen a midden, to prostitutes a brothel, to mothers an inescapable nursery, to children a school, to film stars a looking-glass, to undertakers a morgue, and to myself a security installation powered by the sun and only crackable by death. In everyday life the installation encloses and controls me but in imagination I stand outside manipulating it and peering in upon, Janine?

  59 EMERGENCY BOTTLE

  Not yet. Superb.

  I am going to unrape Superb and abolish that gymnasium and these policemen, who are not necessary. Also that suitcase with the miniskirt in it. She is sufficiently sexy in those tight white denim jeans. On second thoughts I want her in dungaree overalls. And I will drop the business of the car being serviced as Max follows her into the garage pleading with her not to leave him this weekend but she stop.

  Stop. If I start imagining Superb again I will lose control again and hate myself again because I HATE cruelty, I hated Mad Hislop, I hated most of all a total stranger old enough to be my father who walked past me with his two sons into the middle of my own room and WHISKY quickquickquickquickquick on to the floor, get the emergency bottle out of the, damn this lock, case under the bed. Raise lid, grasp bottle, unscrew top. Good stuff. Take it from neck. Again. Again. Dip this foul brain deep in cleansing alcohol. Again. Oh warmth, stupidity, my dear dear friend why am I still hurt by the insults heaped on me by that bloody old man? who was only doing his best for his daughter, he thought. Why was that the worst rape I ever suffered? Why do I still care? He is dead, I am old, we are all cowards. He must have felt very stupid when he discovered the truth. Certainly I did. Certainly Helen did.

  Carefully pour glassful. Get in bed. Sip slowly. The parts of this mind are blissfully disconnecting, thoughts separating from memories, memories from fantasies. If I am lucky nothing now will float to my surface but delicious fragments.

  5:

  I AM THE EYE BY WHICH THE UNIVERSE BEHOLDS ITSELF AND KNOWS IT IS DIVINE.

  We walked in a wood with bright sunlight shining through the leaves. Between the trunks on our right there was fallen brown bracken with an occasional new stem upholding a coiled green tip, and a drift of bluebells, and the cluck-gurgle of the river. On the left was more withered bracken above a slope of moss and primroses. It had rained recently. Everything glittered and the scents of bracken, pine, primroses and wet earth were extra sharp, and the track had many puddles in it. Father and mother, holding a hand on each side, swung me over these puddles. “More more!” I shouted as we approached each one, by which I meant higher and further. I was three years old, perhaps nearer two, but I was the eye by which the universe beheld itself and knew it was divine. The puddles were clear mirrors full of branches and sunlight, the bluebells were like openings into an underground sky, I have never since seen anything as yellow as these primroses when the light touched them. Later I rode my father’s shoulders. I preferred riding him because he raised me higher than my mother could, and my weight was no burden to him, so I leaned sideways and patted her head with kingly condescension. What was the colour of her hair? Did she look up and smile at me? I forget but I know. I was perfectly happy, and in sunlight.

  61 THE SUN MIRRORS HISLOP

  I wish I was the sun, living at the perpetual height of noon, staring down at the middles of the great continents. Does sunlight enjoy touching the bodies it allows us to see? If it does a lot would be understood: why life began, for instance. Oh I wish I was the sun. How delighted all women would be to feel me, each one undressing without shame and opening far more to me than to any mere man, on private beaches and patios and lawns the deliciously young, the ripely mature, the small girls, the aged grannies all languidly turning to let me toast them equally on both sides. Only Scotland would be veiled from me. By these miserable clouds. I feel cold and lonely suddenly. Mirrors reflecting mirrors are the whole show. Who said that? Mad Hislop.

  Mirrors reflecting mirrors are the show where ignorant armies clash by night that thicks man’s blood with cold. A great many resounding phrases have started bubbling into this head lately. I must have picked them up from Hislop, who was perhaps my real father. He recited all the great poets by heart, apart from Burns, who he despised. He planted in me a sincere hatred of poetry. Since leaving school I have not opened one book of it, apart from Burns. The maths and technical teachers were ordinary easygoing people who hardly ever used the belt, I did well with them, but Hislop stalked about the classroom with hands in pockets spouting verses which made no sense to boys who sat as still as stones dreading the moment when he would pick on one of us.

  “Hereto I came to view a voiceless ghost, whither oh whither will its whim now draw me. Why are you staring at me like that, bright youth?”

  I was staring at him because he frightened me and I thought he would punish me if I looked anywhere else.

  “I don’t know sir.”

  “You don’t know. Is that because you are an idiot or a liar?”

  “I don’t know sir.”

  “Show me your exercise book. Hm. Five spelling errors and an almost total absence of punctuation. You are an idiot. What are you?”

  62 SONTAG COME

  “Idiot sir.”

  “Don’t mumble. Answer loud and clear when I ask a question. What are you?”

  “I AM AN IDIOT SIR.”

  “Then I will provide an exercise to focus your mind. I have no favourites in this class
. Go to the blackboard.”

  This is a nasty thing to remember.

  If I remember nothing but pleasant fragments my life will be completely happy. Three great pleasant things once happened to me, forget her and Helen and Sontag. Sontag was the most fun. I did not love her enough for pain to come of it. She arrived suddenly a year after Helen had left. I was in a very bad state. All my work at that time was in Glasgow so there was no travelling to divert the mind and I had not yet learned to be continually drunk. Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us. The doorbell rang and a small woman stood on the mat smiling and saying, “Hello, I was passing and had a minute to spare and I thought is he still living here? I will call up and see. So I came up and here you still are!”

  She was attractive in a slightly forced, strident way, like how I imagine Janine, and at the sight of her the desperate feeling inside me relaxed though I could not remember having seen her before. I said, “Come in. Have you time for a coffee?”

  She followed me into the kitchen and as I spooned the powder into the cups she said, “This place is very neat now but also rather bare.”

  I said, “I’ve chucked out everything I don’t need and I need very little.”