1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  117 ABORTION ADOPTION

  (Abortion?)

  Unlikely. Illegal then, and Denny was a coward about physical things, the slightest cut appalled her. She had nobody to suggest abortion to her, or make arrangements, or put up the money. But in other ways the Health Service was in good working order. In the normal course of things Denny would be hospitalised and the child delivered quite smoothly.

  (Adoption?)

  Probable. She had no parents, no friends, no helpers. I had deprived her of the one or two folk she knew in the hostel. She had a great deal of love in her and nobody to give it to, so she would want to keep the child. But a well-meaning socialworker could have persuaded her that this was an unkind thing to want, that she lacked the means to be a decent mother. Which was perhaps true. And Denny was one of those who are easily bullied by an educated voice. It was probably adopted.

  118 SUICIDE WOOD

  (Suicide?)

  I never thought of suicide before oh no no no no no no no no no crying, I have not cried, ha ha, since poor old Hislop and that daft crowd singing OH FLOOOERRA SCOAT-LAAAAAAN, WHEN WULL WEE SEE YOOER LIKA GEEEEEEN? when will we see your like again.

  Denny was small but sturdy, not the suicidal type. I am the suicidal type and what pushes me to the whisky and the pills is not suffering but rage. Most suicide is a form of spite, I am sure of that, it is murder turned outside-in. Denny was incapable of rage. She never turned her suffering into defiance or into dramas which drew people’s attention. Some childhood defeat had left her feeling that anger was useless so she swallowed suffering whole like a good wee girl, not spitting it back or biting the hand forcing it between her teeth. Those passive sorts never kill themselves. Liar. Even children can have more forced into them than they can bear. Dad only spoke once to me about the First World War but he mentioned Suicide Wood, a grove of leafless but not completely branchless trees in the mud of no-man’s land, in the Somme I think he said, but there were probably several Suicide Woods, it was a very long line. Since nothing else stood up above ground soldiers went there to hang themselves. In the trenches they were confronted by an enemy as desperately unmoving as they were. On each side they had dour hardened men who had frozen into the nightmare life-in-death that thicks man’s blood etcetera. Behind them was an organisation which shot them as deserters if they turned round and walked away, and behind that organisation stood their mothers/fathers/sisters/ girlfriends/the newspapers/British Industry/Capital/Labour/ The Church/The Law/The Government/ The King/ The Empire saying “Go forward lad! It’s your duty! Only you can save us from being raped and plundered by those German boys in the trench before you.” These were not toughguys. They lacked the guts to hold out their hands and mutter “Again!” to the mad teacher continually hitting them with his Lochgelly. So they hanged themselves. “They were mostly seventeen or eighteen,” said my father, “and sixteen-year-olds who had got in by lying about their age.”

  119 PALACE STEPS

  After a pause he said, “But we were all just children.”

  Denny was seventeen forget her. She was tough. She could take it. I bet she had my child adopted and is now happily married to someone of her own class background. She was quite an attractive lassie in her way.

  And since I have at last admitted that I may be a father, a celebration! Fill the glass. A toast to, ourselves of course. Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.

  I am shit.

  A piece of infromation about the Vietnam war stopped me watching/hearing/reading the news with more than a tenth part of my mind. I do not refer to the Mai Lai massacre. I had no sympathy with the far left-wing outcry at that little affair. Herding a lot of mothers and children out of their homes and killing them altogether and almost at once was an act of mercy compared to the killing of over five million Jews, and even more civilian Poles, Russians, homosexuals and gypsies in the Second World War. The population of Scotland is a bit over five million. To shepherd that Jewish Scotland out of its homes and into the suffocation ovens the police and civil services had to use many months of slow torturing degradation. The process would have been faster and more merciful if the army had been in charge, as at Mai Lai, but between 1939 and 1944 the armies were mostly busy with other sorts of work, so children travelled the last stages of that journey without the company of their parents. On the steps of the Palais de something in Paris, an exhibition hall near the Louvre, hundreds of suddenly unfathered and unmothered weans of a few months to a few years old stood/sat/ sobbing/wailing/peeing their breeks with nobody to care for them but two or three frantic female bureaucrats frantically phoning the Prime Minister (or was it the President) to find out what they should do. But the Prime Minister/President was unobtainable. He refused to be informed. If Prime Ministers knew the effect of their decrees on all the people they govern their jobs would be impossible. They can only keep themselves sane and decent by protecting their ignorance. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin could face the torture and death they dealt out because they enjoyed these things, but Pierre Levalle, Gerald Ford, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher were not sadists, they had to ignore the terrified infants pishing the steps of an important public building, the young men and women shut in a football stadium having their etceteras twisted off by soldiers because they had defended their elected government, the deserted wife of an unemployed car-worker who, on a cold day, cannot choose between buying food and having her electricity cut off so spends the money on alcohol then silences her screaming baby by banging it against the wall. I am not being ironical. A government can only do public good by inflicting private injuries. I will go further. A government can only do public good by inflicting public injuries. These facts may be ironical but I am not being ironical.

  120 PUBLIC GOOD

  (Give examples of public good obtained by public injury.)

  I will. Lavalle, by obeying Hitler, made France more comfortable for more Frenchmen than any resistance did. Ford and Carter, by letting the Fruit Company and the C.I.A. do what they liked to South America, kept down the cost of food in North America. Our Harold and our Maggie, by playing along with the Stock Exchange and cutting taxation and the public healing, teaching and lifesaving services, have given new power to the strong bits of Britain, the bits that keep it running.

  (What bits are those?)

  Who are you? Why do you quiz me like this? Don’t answer because you are that still small voice which wants to get me guilty and raving, but several years ago a tiny little item of news in an obscure column of a Sunday newspaper showed me that, even though I am not a Prime Minister, even though I live at the social level where the world’s main work is done, I had better ignore all politics, all facts not immediately under my nose. In Vietnam, the paper said, observers in the zones defended by the United States military presence are disturbed by an increase in the number of deaths by suicide. Examples of teenagers committing suicide, though not frequent, occur in most cultures but the widespread phenomenon of children under the ages of twelve and ten committing suicide is something altogether new. READ ALL ABOUT IT! OBSERVERS DISTURBED BY INCREASE OF WIDESPREAD PHENOMENON! Hahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahysterically funny. Womb-shakingly funny. Earth-quakingly funny.

  121 FORGOTTEN CHILDREN

  Suicide no no no not Denny small sturdy girl decent Health Service Vietnam war nothing to do with us yes we sold them weapons all in the way of business but that was another time another country and it stopped, it ended, the war ended, boat people yes some came to Britain and many Americans adopted Vietnam orphans, all forgotten now, over long ago, forgotten children. Forgotten children. Forgotten children. Have mercy God. Mercy God. Please please please have mercy on me.

  Sweatwet, slightly bruised, pegged out starfishwise on this bed in this room in Peebles or Selkirk, what, apart from mercy, do I most need?

  Sip?

  No.

  Sleep.

  9:

&
nbsp; YAHOOHAY, I AM LUCKY.

  Two naps within forty minutes, I do not often sleep so well. What was that dream? A lot happened in it but all I clearly recall is lying in a warm pool of sea water on a sunny beach. The pool was also a bathtub with flaking, cream-coloured paint on the bottom which I saw in an old house on Partickhill Road where Sontag lived with all those women and children. I lay in the water feeling very relaxed and watching the skin unwinding from around my chest in broad strips. As the strips floated up and flattened out on the surface I saw they were printed like newspapers with columns of words, dim photographs, an occasional headline. I was not interested in this old news, I wanted to see what was underneath. In a leisurely way I picked and peeled off the layers of skin-newsprint which still stuck to my chest until I had exposed the whole ribcage. I could see only blackness inside but I knew it contained a rare work of art, a white ivory figure of a girl, obscenely mutilated. I pushed my fingers between the ribs and almost managed to touch her.

  Ugh. When I started remembering that dream I thought it a happy one. It is utterly gruesome.

  123 NOTHING

  What can I think about now? I am sick of fantasies. O I will return to them but later, please God much later. I don’t want to remember the past either. The past is a flowering minefield. All the goodness I have known grows there but grows among explosives which drive shrapnel into my brain whenever I disturb them. Try thinking about the future.

  The future is nothing. Nada. I have reached the summit of my profession, the edge of the precipice. I can only be promoted sideways to a deskjob which would kill me in less than a year. My present job will do that too. Reeves wants me to retire and yes, I could do that with no great loss of earnings but retire to what? I have no garden to cultivate, no stamp collection to complete. I can be promoted into nothing, or wait for nothing, or retire into nothing. Hence my outcry a while ago, my hysterical prayer to have put someone in the world as a replacement. But it does not matter a damn who has fathered a child if he has not given it care and attention, and praying does more harm than good. Prayers work, they really do summon up God, but when the bastard arrives he does nothing but hang around my head telling me what a nasty boy I am. He’s as bad as a woman. He detests my fantasy life. He has no respect for my ordinary, everyday life. I suspect he wants more gaiety and freedom. In spite of the vile publicity he has had from all his churches and most of his bibles I think that he dislikes stultification and cruelty, that the only pains he wants are birthpangs, the strains of making something good and new, the cares of mending something useful and old. BUT THE BUGGER OFFERS NO PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS. “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” The middle and upper classes are able to do that because they can choose neighbours of their own sort, but such advice is useless to the unemployed and though I am now middle-class it is no use to me. I could not love my wife, how can I love my neighbour? I do not even know his face, my neighbour is a noise in a room next door. Fuck off God and don’t come back. I intend to forget you. My only hope for the future is a sudden change in my surroundings, a change I cannot initiate. A war would do the trick. Scotland is wired for it.

  124 MODERN SCOTLAND

  Scotland is wired for war, especially the bit north-west of Glasgow. The Nato nuclear bombers have come to the Isle of Skye. Apart from a handful of landowners and clergymen the local folk do not want them but no government need be moved by the wishes of the northern native, especially not the Gaelic native. Down waterlanes on the Firth of Clyde American and British missile submarines slip to and from their fuel bases. Between Loch Lomond and Gareloch one hill at least is honeycombed with galleries where the multi-megaton warheads are stockpiled. Some natural features of this wilderness are no longer marked on ordnance survey maps and new structures are certainly not marked there. This secrecy is not meant to baffle the Russians but adjacent Britons who feel uneasy about such things. In the event of a nuclear war (not the total sort big governments dread but the limited sort they hope for) it is important that the primary Russian weaponstrike is at Europe, not America, and at West Scotland, not South England. In the mid-seventies when the British government still pretended an interest in devolution (what a word!) there was a proposal to shift a big part of the Ministry of Defence from London to Glasgow. Sir William, the Lord Provost, thought this might bring employment to a city badly needing it. We were told later that civil servants refused to come to Glasgow because it had too few theatres, not enough nice houses and people. Whether true or false these reasons were irrelevant. Shifting the Defence Ministry to a city whose centre is twenty-five miles from the Gareloch would be a bit like General Haig shifting his staff headquarters to the edge of no-man’s land. In the Home Counties civil defence instructors have been quietly telling concerned parties that if the war goes as expected the main English problem will be handling refugees from the north. But that problem is unlikely to be great. The army has plans to seal off badly radiated districts. Officers know they must order the shooting of people trying to leave. Our regiments have practised pushing back civilians in Aden and Ulster. If discipline holds – and for three hundred years the British soldier has been spectacularly obedient − the unhealthy bits of Britain will be sliced off to ensure that the healthy bits survive.

  125 OBEDIENT BRITAINS

  For three hundred years, in victory and defeat, against disciplined and undisciplined enemies the British soldier has been spectacularly obedient. At Hohenlinden, Quebec, Bunker Hill, Corunna, Waterloo, Peterloo, The March on Peking, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Indian Mutiny, The Boer War, Passchendaele, Ypres, Gallipoli, forget Dunkirk but in Africa, Palestine, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus and Ulster our men did what they were told and sometimes a bit extra. Why should they not stand firm and ensure that the inhabitants of the Central Lowlands die in their own ditch and not somewhere else? They will be defending the biggest part of their country from the evil effects of Russian foreign policy, and I am sure the British High Command will be too tactful to use the Scottish regiments in Scotland. The Royal Anglians and Sherwood Foresters will seal off Strathclyde while the Argylls and the Black Watch deal with secondary targets like Tyneside, Mersey side or Birmingham. What matters nowadays is not where or why four or five million people die, but how fast. Whether we bake à la Hiroshima or spend a week spewing our rings up we will still have died faster than those Poles, Jews and Gypsies.

  We?

  Not we. I will live, if I choose. I know where the shelters are. I have supervised their security installations. I have tested their alarm circuits, surveillance circuits, defence circuits. I know too much to be locked outside in a state of national emergency. So I can look forward to several days, weeks perhaps, of canned soup and Scrabble games with the local administrators of national security. Unless the Third World War gets out of hand and we find it wiser to stay in hiding for months or years. I guess our average age will be around forty, the proportion of men to women three to one. If the electric generator fails or the food runs out an observer of human nature will find much to interest him. But that is taking the pessimistic view. If the war is the a sort that sensible people want − and surely in the high commands of Britain and America, Russia and China, sensible people predominate − then one morning before the century ends I will surface in a country which has suffered, what?

  126 BREAKING COUNTRY

  The main highland grousemoors and salmonrivers will be unpolluted, also the good beefproducing land and fishing villages and golf-courses of the north-east. Even Gleneagles and St Andrews are likely to escape. The borders and southern uplands, the milltowns of Tweedside, the Orkneys and oilrigs will be intact. Nothing will have perished but some crofting communities, seaside resorts and what was Britain’s most productive industrial province when London was the commercial capital of the world. But the Clydeside has outlived its usefulness. During the Second World War it produced 90 per cent of British shipping but since the American polaris base arrived in the fifties capital has withdrawn and manufacture conc
entrated in the south. I am sure there is no connection between these two events, it is just a harmonious coincidence. Our big firms have been bought by bigger non-Scottish firms and then reduced in size or closed. Scottish investors prefer putting their money into business which operates in coolie nations where trade unions never had a chance. Glasgow now means nothing to the rest of Britain but unemployment, drunkenness and out-of-date radical militancy. Her nuclear destruction will logically conclude a steady peacetime process. It’s a pity about Edinburgh. It has almost nothing to do with Glasgow but stands too near to go unscathed. Let us hope that only the people die and the buildings and monuments are undamaged, then in a few years the Festival can resume as merrily as ever. It is mostly the work of foreigners, anyway.