1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  They stared at me blankly. The Scottish director shouted,

  “What?”

  I repeated my apology. The English director shouted, “The show. Yes, but a lot has happened since then. Never mind about the show.”

  After a pause I shouted, “Has anyone seen Helen’s handbag?”

  They found it on a chair. I bade them good night and went upstairs. I learned later that after the show Binkie had told Diana, through the agency of the English director, that he would like her to audition for a small part in a London show, a show in which the English director had been promised a larger part. Diana was so delighted that she told Brian, and Brian suddenly realised she and the English director were lovers. His grief at this discovery was so huge that Helen was forced to realise that he and Diana had also been lovers. It is possible too that Helen envied Diana’s success with Binkie. Certainly Rory envied Diana’s success with Binkie, because his grief at Binkie’s neglect of him was so spectacular that Roddy decided that Rory and Binkie had been lovers, and threatened suicide. At this point Judy, who was also the English director’s lover, suddenly slapped his face, said something astonishingly obscene about him and his Scottish connections, and walked out followed by the rest of the English company and their friends. Then Helen set off upstairs with an ominously deliberate tread, I suppose to seduce me, while Rory and Roddy unexpectedly went to a party together leaving the three doublecrossers to commiserate.

  269 HELEN’S APOLOGY

  Helen was not in the closet when I got back upstairs. I was relieved but also worried, so I visited the well-publicised dormitory. The wall facing the door had a row of uncurtained windows admitting some light from the night sky and the streetlamps of the West Bow. I saw a bare expanse of floor with, to right and left of it, a row of mattresses supporting quiet bodies in sleeping bags. I saw Helen’s mattress was occupied so I tiptoed over to it. On a large suitcase placed flat like a tray lay her folded clothing, a toothbrush, a book and the packet of cigarettes. I respected her for laying out her things, in a distraught hour, as neatly as I would have done. I was placing the handbag very cautiously beside the suitcase when I noticed she was not asleep. From deep inside her sleepingbag came muffled but unmistakable sobbing. I felt a pang of affection for her, because she was not really a stony woman. I stooped and gently patted the contour of her shoulder and murmured, “Don’t worry, Helen.”

  The sobs stopped and her tearwet face surfaced among folds of the bag like the face of a nearly drowned woman emerging from black water. I had never seen her so beautiful. She whispered, “I’m sorry, Jock.”

  I smiled at her and whispered, “See you tomorrow.”

  I returned to my bed and fell asleep at once. Helen’s apology had restored my confidence. I was now sure that the worst possible things had happened to the company, and that the company would survive them.

  270 SCOTLAND

  TENTH NIGHT

  I woke very fresh and early next morning and saw that the sky through the little window was clean pale blue. It struck me that since the start of the show I had seen nothing of Edinburgh except the inside of the Deacon Brodie, which explained my recent unhealthy frame of mind. I arose, washed, shaved and dressed, feeling glad I had at least maintained clean habits in a place where they could easily have slackened. Then I went a walk. It was yet another sunny windy day, the weather that August cannot always have been as windy and sunny as I remember it. I walked again down that High Street which has half of Scotland’s ancientest buildings on it, or seems to have. In those days there were fewer galleries, souvenir shops and gift shops, and the middle classes had not reoccupied the old tenements. Projecting pulleys from fifth, sixth and seventh-floor windows held out washinglines across the courts and closes, and I seem to recall skirts and pants flapping like flags over the High Street itself, but surely that was illegal? Opposite the main gate of Holyrood I saw a wee general-goods store of the sort that sold liquorice straps, the Sunday Post and Will’s Wild Woodbine cigarettes in green and gold paper packets of five. A very old man sat on the shop windowledge, hands crossed upon a stick planted between his legs. He wore a hookerdoon bunnet, smoked a short clay pipe and looked thoroughly at home. I was sure that when the queen was in residence she often saw him from the palace windows, for nowhere else in Britain did the royal and the ordinary come so close. For no sensible reason this thought greatly cheered me.

  I crossed the palace yard to the south gate and followed the road through a meadow to a small loch with swans. I climbed up past a bit of ruin to the end of the Salisbury Crags and walked along the top of these. I descended through grassy dells to the steep side of Arthur’s Seat, then toiled straight up until I reached, and leaned breathless against, an indicator table beside the tip of the cone. Great spaciousness again. A few white mammal-bellied clouds dandered like plutocrats across the blue floor of the sky, and the reeky old city and many sorts of town and village and farmland were below me, and bleak hills edging the borders behind me, and the blue mountains edging the highlands in front, and the firth between them widening with islands and ships to the sea. Was Ben Nevis and Ben Lomond and Tinto Hill visible that day? Not likely, but I think the indicator pointed to them as if they were. Glasgow was hidden by the moors beyond Bathgate and I regretted this, because it was only forty or fifty miles away. I realised that Scotland was shaped like a fat messy woman with a surprisingly slender waist. A threestranded belt of road, canal and railway crossed that waist joining Edinburgh and the ports facing Europe to Glasgow and the ports facing Ireland and America. And the woman was rich! She had enough land to feed us all if we used her properly, and sealochs and pure rivers for fishfarming, and hills to grow timber on. Her native iron was exhausted, but we had coalbeds which would last another two centuries, and a skilled industrial population who could make anything in the heavy-engineering line. All we needed were new ideas and the confidence to make them work, and Scotland had Alan and I and many like us who could make practical realities out of any number of new ideas. The dramatic disaster of the previous evening came to mind and I grinned because drama is unimportant. But I was glad to have learned about theatrical lighting. If I ever got interested in television (television could easily become an important industry) then the experience would be useful. I was also glad to have met Binkie, for in trying to impress him I had become inventive and voluble in an unexpected way. The negative light concept now seemed improbable but the hologram was not. It would require the development of narrow but intricately structured lightbeams. Electromagnetics held the solution to that problem and such beams would be useful in many more fields than entertainment. I was young, I was learning, I belonged to a splendid country, I was on the edge of an unforeseeable future but I knew it would be a great one. I ran downhill by the easy gradient, taking great leaps to work off my exhilaration.

  271 SCOTLAND

  I walked round a lot of Edinburgh that morning, avoiding places where I would meet people I knew. I saw some splendid early engines in the university museum, climbed the Scott monument, then lunched on a pie and pint in a basement in Hanover Street. The bar was crowded except where three men stood in a small open space created by the attention of the other customers. One had a sombre pouchy face and upstanding hair which seemed too like thistledown to be natural, one looked like a tall sarcastic lizard, one like a small sly shy bear. “Our three best since Burns,” a bystander informed me, “barring Sorley of course.”

  272 POSTCARD

  I nodded as if I knew what he meant then went out and bought a picturecard view of the castle. I dispatched it to Denny from the central post-office with a message saying that I loved her and missed her and would be home in four days. I may even have mentioned marriage. I hope not, but it’s possible. My experience with Helen the night before had put me off the idea of casual sex. I felt friendlier toward Helen since her seduction and apology. I even admired her for it, but I never wanted to lie with her in bed again.

  The club was quieter t
han usual when I returned. I sat drinking coffee beside Roddy, Rory and the writer who were also quieter than usual. I said, “Where are the girls?”

  Roddy said, “Helen’s gone home to her parents. I expect Diana’s at the police station again but that won’t do any good.”

  I said, “Helen home? Diana police station? Why?”

  The three stared at me as if I had asked what country we were in. Roddy said, “Surely you know that Brian’s been arrested?”

  My imagination took a flying leap. I said, “Do you mean these paintings were valuable after all?”

  “Yes, they’re worth thousands. But that’s only part of it.”

  In the early forenoon the police had come to the club, probably because a newspaper had hinted that it was a bad place, and because policemen are paid to arrest badness.

  273 DISASTER

  After questioning some members of the staff, and looking into every room, and finding nothing criminal (for there was nothing criminal to find) they asked to see the club books, in order to take them away and have them examined by experts. They said the process might take two or three days. The practical radical reminded them that he could not legally open his club without his books, and since it was only operating through the festival, a closure of two or three days would either bankrupt him or make him unable to pay all his helpers. The police said this was unfortunate, but that if his books were in order he would certainly get them back in two or three days. This was before the days of the cheap photocopier. The practical radical asked permission to accompany his books to the station so that, if experts had no immediate use for them, he could copy out entries with the help of a friend. The police said yes, so Brian and a portable typewriter accompanied the practical radical to the police station, because Brian knew how to type and was equally keen for the club to open that night. Shortly after they left, one of the landlords of the club premises arrived with his lawyer – their curiosity had also been stimulated by the newspaper article. They were surprised to find the club occupying twice or thrice the area agreed upon, and appalled at the additions to the portraits, which were indeed by Raeburn. They demanded to see the individuals who had authorised all this. Rather than direct them to the police station everyone denied knowledge of their whereabouts, but said they would be back before evening, and would contact them at the first opportunity. The landlord and lawyer went away in very bad tempers. Diana ran to the police station for instructions and was told that Brian and the practical radical were now locked in the cells for assaulting the police, resisting arrest, and wilfully destroying public property. She was not allowed to speak to them because she was not a lawyer, and because they were receiving medical treatment for injuries sustained while committing the second and third of the crimes charged to them. Diana returned to the club with this news, whereupon Helen announced that she was sick and tired of all this; she could not take any more; she was going home to her mother and they need only phone her if they wanted her for something really important. And she packed her things and left.

  274 POLICE ASSAULT

  The rest of us were also greatly disturbed, though when Brian came to tell the whole story we learned that nothing queer had happened. On reaching the police station the radical and he were given a table in the corner of a busy office. He typed, the radical dictated, and after an hour they stopped to calculate. They found that if they worked continuously until the club was due to open they would copy fewer than half the entries, so their work was useless. They explained this to the sergeant in charge of the main desk, and pled to be allowed the loan of their books during the late hours when the club was busiest, since no professional expert would want them at such times. The sergeant explained that he had no authority to allow this, and neither had anyone else in the station. This news made Brian and the radical talk faster and louder. They repeated what they had already said but larded it with irony, sarcasm and threats of legal action. Brian said that not even the police were superior to the laws that protected the freedom of Scottish citizens. He and the radical were excited by a powerful sense of injustice. They thought that because they had done nothing wrong they were perfectly safe, which was itself a wrong assumption. They waved pointed fingers at the sergeant, which was a technical assault, so he charged them with assault. On the way to the cells they moved slightly faster or slower than the policemen escorting them wished, so they fell down and badly bent the metal frame of a wastepaper basket. But no bones were broken, and the bruises needed only superficial doctoring. The chain of events which dragged them into the cells was inexorably commonplace.

  So that night we put a sign on the main entrance announcing that through unforeseen circumstances the club would be closed until further notice, then we barricaded ourselves inside and sat in glum little groups listening, as the evening wore on, to the hammering on the door of angry members demanding the return of their fees. I felt a huge frustration, a great desire to be doing something positive and practical. The frustration was partly sexual. Helen had aroused but not satisfied me and I was desperate to enter Denny again. Around me were many dour people becoming stolidly drunk with no prospect of wit or exuberance. I said to the remnant of the company, “I tell you what I will do tomorrow. I have been paid for the work I’ve done here – I don’t suppose you have?”

  275 I DISMANTLE US

  They had not. I said, “Right. If Brian and Helen don’t come back tomorrow afternoon I will dismantle the theatre and return the scaffolding to the firm which lent it. I will also pay rental on a van so that Roddy and Rory can return the lights and properties to Glasgow.”

  After a silence someone said, “Why the hurry?”

  I said, “I see no hurry in that action. I dislike waste, that’s why I’ll do it. Between bad publicity, police harassment, angry lawyers, angry landlords, angry customers, destroyed masterpieces, an injured director and a missing leading lady the show has now no chance at all. Hanging on here is a waste of time, energy and money. The police are going to keep those books for at least another couple of days, so even if the club does manage to open again, and even if Helen and Brian do come back to us, we will only have one other performance, a performance in which the cast will again outnumber the audience. Let’s not descend to that.”

  Diana said, “You are not the director, Jock, you are our electrician. Nothing may be as definite as you think. We should do nothing until Brian gets back.”

  ELEVENTH NIGHT

  But by three o’clock next afternoon Brian had not returned and I was prepared to wait no longer. I phoned the firm which had lent us the scaffolding. It had some spare men who could pick it up within the hour. They were even prepared to help dismantle it. I said, “Come on over.”

  With the help of the Gorbals Young Communists, who were also sick of doing nothing, we unscrewed and unclamped and lowered and stacked while watched in perfect silence by Roddy, Rory, the writer and Diana. My work-team was efficient. By five o’clock all poles, clamps and planks had left the premises. I removed my overalls. I washed. I joined the silent company at the cellar table. My body was pleasantly relaxed from the afternoon’s exertion. I knew people were displeased with me, but knew that feeling would pass because I had acted sensibly.

  276 BRIAN’S RETURN

  Ten minutes later we were roused by a cheer from people at the end of the cellar near the door. The practical radical and Brian were entering with sticking plaster on their faces and bright determined grins. Brian came straight over to us.

  “All right, darlings!” he said with all his old swagger.

  “Sorry for the hiatus but now we’re ready to roll again. Business as usual tonight.”

  Diana said, “You mean the club can open?”

  “Yes. They gave us the books back when they let us out two hours ago. The desk sergeant said, ‘Here, do you want these things? They’re no use to us,’ and handed them over.”

  “What about the charges?”

  “Our lawyer says that if we plea
d guilty to police assault they’ll drop the bit about resisting arrest and damaging the wastepaper basket. It seems that the most we’re liable to is a five-pound fine, but we may be let off with an admonition if we act apologetic enough.”

  “What about the paintings? And the landlords?”

  “We’ve just come from the landlords. They’ve been very reasonable. I told them that the Raeburns had been vandalised with poster paint, which washes off very easily. And the club is going to pay rent for the extra space we’ve grabbed, so everything’s fine. Would someone get me a very strong coffee? I feel I deserve it. Where’s Helen by the way?”

  “She’s gone home to her parents.”

  “Well for Heaven’s sake phone her! We need her for the show tonight. In fact don’t just phone her, tell her we’re coming to collect her and do it. Jock, she trusts you, you go and get her. Her folk stay in Cambuslang, it’s only an hour away by train. Why is everybody looking so glum?”

  I told him what I had done. He sat down at the table and said, “All of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stage and auditorium?”

  “Yes.”

  277 HASTE AND FOLLY

  “Oh my God. What time is it?”

  “Too late to get the scaffolding back. Everything’s shut, you see. I’m sorry, Brian. I’m sorry, everyone.”

  Brian sat still for a long time. His only signs of pain were a few deep sighs. It occurred to me that he was the only one among us who had loved the whole show. The actors, the writer and I loved the show for what we gave to it, but he had loved the whole thing, and now he just sat sighing and shaking his head slightly. Diana sat beside him and laid her arm on his shoulder as tenderly as a fine doctor laying a bandage on a wound. He smiled slightly and said, “I’m all right, Diana. I’m all right.”