Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  “What is the Q39?”

  “You’ve seen them. They’re being assembled in the yards near the river.”

  “Do you mean these big metal constructions like bombs or bullets?”

  “You think they look like bombs, do you? Good! Good! That cheers me greatly. Actually they’re shelters to protect the civilian population. Each one is capable of housing five hundred souls when the balloon goes up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About the balloon? It’s a figure of speech derived from an outmoded combat system. It means, when the sign goes out that the big show is starting.”

  “What show?”

  “I can’t tell you precisely, because it could take several different forms. We could be on the receiving end of any one of sixty-eight different types of attack, and I don’t mind telling you that we’re only capable of defending ourselves against three of them.’ Hopeless! Why bother?’ you say, and miss the point entirely. The other side is as badly placed as we are. These preparations for the big show may be pretty inadequate, but if we stop them the balloon will go up. Am I depressing you?”

  “No, but I’m confused.”

  The tall man nodded sympathetically, “I know, it’s difficult. Metaphor is one of thought’s most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing.”

  It struck Lanark that in spite of his smooth flow of words the tall man was drunk. Somebody grunted nearby. Lanark turned and saw a stout elderly man sitting immobile in one of the chairs. He wore a dark blue suit and waistcoat. His eyes were shut but he was not asleep, for his hands were grasping his knees. Lanark gasped and said, “Who is that?”

  “That is one of our city fathers. That is Baillie Dodd.”

  The man in the chair said, “No.”

  “Well, actually he’s more than just Baillie Dodd. He’s Provost Dodd.” The tall man began to laugh. “Yes!” he said between gasps, “that’s the Lord Provost of this whole, fucking big metropopolis.”

  He silenced his chuckles by drinking what was left in the glass, then went to the sideboard to refill. The Provost said, “What does he want?”

  The tall man looked over his shoulder. “Yes, Lanark, what do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He said he wants nothing, Dodd.”

  After a moment the Provost said flatly, “Then he’s no use to us.”

  The tall man returned to his seat saying, “I begin to fear you’re right.” He smiled at Lanark and sat down. “I suppose in the end you’ll join the protest people.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Oh, they’re very nice people. No bother, really. My daughter is one. We have great arguments about it all. I had hoped you were a vertebrate, but I see you’re a crustacean. You’ll be at home with the protest people because most of them are crustaceans. Now you’re going to ask what crustaceans are, so I’ll tell you. The crustacean isn’t a mere mass of sentient acquisitiveness, like your leech or your sponge. It has a distinct shape. But the shape is not based on a backbone, it derives from the insensitive shell which contains the beast. In the crustacean class you will find the scorpion, the lobster and the louse.” He smiled into his whisky. Lanark knew he had been insulted and stood up, saying sharply, “Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”

  “Third on the left as you go out.”

  Lanark went to the door but turned before reaching it. He said, “Perhaps the Provost could tell me what his city is called?”

  “Certainly he could. So could I. But for security reasons we’re not going to.”

  Lanark opened the door to step through but was arrested by a cry of “Lanark!”

  He turned and saw the man standing up gazing at him intently. “Lanark, if you ever come to feel you would like (how can I put it?) like to strike a blow for the good old vertebrate Divine Image, get in touch with me will you?”

  There were tears in his eyes. Lanark went quickly out, feeling embarrassed.

  The corridor was still in darkness. He turned left and moved toward the staircase, counting doors. The third one did not open into a bathroom but into a luxurious, brilliantly lit bedroom. On the quilt of the double bed moved a huge knot of limbs with the heads of Frankie, Toal and Sludden sticking out. Lanark slammed the door and clapped his hands over his eyes but the image of what he had seen stayed inside the lids: a knot of limbs with three crazily vacant faces, and Sludden’s mouth opening and shutting as if eating something. He hurried to the stairs and ran down them to the cloakroom. He was looking for his coat among the heap on the table when a slurred voice said, “I feel we’ve never really understood each other.”

  Gloopy stood grinning emptily in the doorway. His legs were together and his arms pressed to his sides, his oiled grey hair and silver jacket glistened wetly. He took a few steps nearer, walking as if his thighs were glued together, then fell forward onto the floor with a sodden slap. He lay in the posture in which he had stood, except that his face was tilted so far back that it grinned blindly at the ceiling. Without moving his limbs he suddenly slid an inch or two toward Lanark along the polished floorboards, and then the light went out.

  The darkness and silence were so complete that for a moment Lanark was deafened by the noise of his own breathing. Then he heard Gloopy say, “People ought to be nice to one another. Why can’t you and I—”

  The words were cut short by a chilling draught which blew up suddenly from the floor bringing with it a salt stench like rotting weeds. Lanark felt he was on the lip of a horrible pit. He grew dizzy and crouched to the floor, afraid to move his feet and terrified of falling down. He squatted in the darkness like this for a very long time.

  At last he saw light from the hall shining through the doorway. A bulky figure appeared in it, grunted and switched the light on. It was Provost Dodd. Lanark stood up, feeling sick and foolish, and said, “Gloopy. He’s disappeared. Gloopy’s disappeared!”

  The Provost stared about the room as if Lanark were not in it and muttered, “No great loss, I would have thought.”

  Lanark was filled with the conviction that every footstep in that room might land in an invisible trap. He managed to move to the door without running. The Provost said, “Wait.”

  Lanark stepped into the hall before turning to him. The Provost pushed out his lower lip, frowned down at his shoes, then said, “You came with a girl. She had black hair and wore a black sweater and her skirt was … I forget the colour.”

  “Black.”

  “Quite so. Do you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  The Provost stared at him for a while then turned away, saying heavily, “Anyway, it’s all the same. It’s all the same.”

  Lanark hurried out, slamming the door hard behind him.

  CHAPTER 5.

  Rima

  There was fog outside. The light from the windows saturated it so that the mansion seemed wrapped in a cocoon of milky light, but outside the cocoon Lanark walked in total obscurity and only found his way down the drive by the crunch of gravel underfoot and the touch of rimy leaves on his hands and face.

  On the pavement it was possible to steer through the murk by the glow of the street lamp ahead. The clammy air made his footsteps resound loudly but after five minutes he decided that what seemed like echoes were the footsteps of someone behind. His back prickled apprehensively. He stood against a hedge and waited. The other footsteps hesitated, then came boldly on. In the fog’s cloudy dimness a shadow appeared and developed an unusual density of black, then the slim black figure of Rima passed by giving him only the flicker of a glance. He hurried after her crying gladly, “Rima! It’s me!”

  “So I see.”

  “Provost Dodd was looking for you.”

  “Who’s Provost Dodd?”

  The question seemed meant to stop conversation rather than aid it. He walked beside her, thinking of what he had seen of her friends in the bedro
om. This memory no longer horrified. It combined with his words to the blond girl, with Gloopy’s disappearance and with the fog; it cast around her an odour of exciting malign sexual possibility. He asked abruptly, “Did you enjoy the party?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “If you must know I spent most of the time in the bathroom with Gay. She was very sick.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Do you want to talk to me at all?”

  “No.”

  His heart and penis hardened in angry amazement. He gripped her arms and pulled her round to face him saying softly, “Why?” She glared into his eyes and yelled, “Because I’m afraid of you!”

  He was hit by a feeling of shame and weariness. He let her go, shrugging his shoulders and muttering, “Well, maybe that’s wise of you.”

  Half a minute later he was surprised to find her walking beside him. She said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Maybe I am a dangerous man.”

  She began laughing but quickly smothered this and slipped a hand through his arm. The light pressure made him calmer and stronger.

  They came to a street corner. The fog was very thick. A tramcar clanged past a few feet in front of them, but nothing could be seen of it. Rima said, “Where’s your coat? You’re shivering.”

  “So are you. I’d take you for a coffee but I don’t know where we are.”

  “You’d better come with me. I live nearby and I stole a bottle of brandy from the party.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  Rima withdrew her hand sharply and said, “You, are a very, big, wet, drip!”

  Lanark was stung by this. He said, “Rima, I am not clever or imaginative. I have only a few rules to live by. These rules may annoy folk who are clever enough to live without them, but I can’t help that and you ought not to blame me.”

  “All right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You can make me apologize by breathing on me, it seems.”

  They turned the corner. Lanark said, “But I can frighten you too.”

  She was silent.

  “And I can make you laugh.”

  She laughed slightly and took his arm again.

  They seemed to enter a lane between low buildings like private garages. Rima unlocked a door, led him up a steep narrow wooden stair and switched a light on. Her austere manner and clothing had made Lanark expect a stark room. This room was small, with a sloping ceiling and not much furniture, but there were many sad little personal touches. Childish crayon sketches of unconvincing green fields and blue seas were fixed to the walls. There was the only clock Lanark remembered seeing, carved and painted like a log cabin, with a pendulum below and a gilt weight shaped like a fir cone. The hands were missing. A stringless guitar lay on a chest of drawers and a teddy bear sat on the bed, which was a mattress on the floor against the wall. Rima clicked the switch of the electric radiator, removed her coat and became busy with a kettle and gas ring in a cupboard-sized scullery. There were no chairs, so Lanark sat on the floor and leaned on the bed. The radiator heated the small place so quickly that he was soon able to remove his fog-sodden jacket and jersey, yet though his skin was warm he was still shaken from inside by spasms of shivering. Rima carried in two large mugs of black coffee. She sat on the bed with her legs folded under her and handed a mug to Lanark saying, “You probably won’t refuse to drink it.”

  The coffee flavour was drowned by the taste of sugar and brandy.

  Later Lanark lay back on the bed, feeling comfortable and slightly drunk. Rima, her eyes closed, rested her shoulders against the wall and cradled the teddy bear in her lap. Lanark said, “You’ve been kind to me.”

  She stroked the old toy’s head. Lanark tried to think of other words. He said, “Did you come to this town long ago?”

  “What does ‘long’ mean?”

  “Were you very small when you came?”

  She shrugged.

  “Do you remember a time when days were long and bright?” Tears slid from under her closed lids. He touched her shoulders.

  “Let me undress you?”

  She allowed this. As he unfastened her brassière his hands met a familiar roughness.

  “You’ve got dragonhide! Your shoulderblades are covered!”

  “Does that excite you?”

  “I have it too!”

  She cried out harshly, “Do you think that makes a bond between us?”

  He shook his head urgently and placed a finger on her lips, feeling that words would move them farther apart. His anxiety to be tender to someone who needed and rejected tenderness made his caresses clumsy, until genital eagerness sucked thought out of him.

  He felt relieved afterward and would have liked to sleep. He heard her rise briskly from his side and start dressing. She said curtly, “Well? Was it fun?”

  He tried to think then said defiantly, “Yes. Great fun.”

  “How nice for you.”

  A nightmare feeling began to rise around him. He heard her say, “You’re not good at sex, are you? I suppose Sludden is the best I’ll ever get.”

  “You told me that you didn’t …. love …. Sludden.”

  “I don’t, but I use him sometimes. Just as he uses me. He and I are very cold people.”

  “Why did you let me come here?”

  “You wanted so much to be warm that I thought perhaps you were. You’re as cold as the rest of us, really, and even more worried about it. I suppose that makes you clumsy.” He was drowned in nightmare now, lying on the bottom of it as on an ocean bed, yet he could breathe. He said, “You’re trying to kill me.”

  “Yes, but I won’t manage. You’re terribly solid.”

  She finished dressing and slapped his cheek briskly saying, “Come on. I can’t apologize to you again. Get up and get dressed.”

  She stood with her back against the chest of drawers, watching while he slowly dressed, and when he finished she said inexorably, “Goodbye, Lanark.”

  All his feelings were numbed but he stood a moment, staring stupidly at her feet. She said, “Goodbye, Lanark!” and gripped his arm and led him to the door, and pushed him out and slammed it.

  He groped his way downstairs. Near the bottom he heard her open the door and shout “Lanark!” He looked back. Something dark and whirling came down on his head, heavily enfolding it, and again the door slammed. He dragged the thing off and found it was a sheepskin jacket with the fleece turned inward. He hung this on the inside knob of the bottom door and stepped into the lane and walked away.

  After a time the dense freezing fog and his arctic brain and body blended. He moved along streets in them, a numb kernel of soul kept going by feet somewhere underneath. The only thing he felt very conscious of was his itching right arm, and several times he stopped and rubbed it backward and forward against corners of walls to scratch it through the sleeve. The sounds and lights of tramcars passed him frequently now, and after crossing a street he was puzzled by a complicated shape between himself and the flow of a high lamp. Going nearer he discerned a queen with a long train riding side-saddle on a rearing horse. It was a statue in the great square. He considered going for warmth to the security office but decided he needed something to drink. He crossed other streets till he saw red neon shining above the pavement. He opened the tinkling door of a small aromatic tobacconist shop, crossed to a staircase and went down into Galloway’s Tearoom. This was a low-ceilinged place much bigger than the shop upstairs. Most of it was alcoves, some opening from others, each with a sofa, table and chairs in it and a stag’s head on a plaque. Lanark ordered lemon tea, sat in the corner of a sofa and fell asleep.

  He awoke long afterward. The glass of tea was cold on the table before him and he was listening to a conversation between two businessmen. His ear was an inch from a thick brown curtain separating his sofa from where they sat and clearly they had no sense of being overheard.

  “… Dodd is on our
side. After all, the Corporation has nothing to do but light the streets and keep the trams running, and these services don’t pay for themselves. They have to be subsidized by the sale of municipal property, so Dodd is selling and I’m buying.”

  “But what will you do with it?”

  “Sublet. The smallest of these rooms could contain sixteen single apartments if we divided them up with matchboard partitions. I’ve measured.”

  “Don’t be mad! Why should anyone want a tiny apartment just because it’s on the square? There’s no profit in being a landlord with a third of the city standing empty.”

  “No profit at the moment. I mean to sublet these eventually.”

  “Don’t be mysterious, Aitcheson. You can trust me.”

  “All right. You know the population is smaller than it used to be. Have you faced the fact that it gets smaller all the time?”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  There was a silence. “What about the new arrivals?”

  “Not enough of them. You live in a hotel, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course. So do I. Nobody notices disappearances in a hotel. In the normal way you expect the man in the next room to disappear after a while. Life is different in a tenement. Suddenly the house across the landing is empty. A little later the one upstairs goes empty too. Then you notice there are no lights in half the windows across the street. It’s disturbing! Mind you, people are still pretending not to notice. Wait till they have no neighbours left. Wait till they’re lonely and the panic starts! They’ll crowd to the city centre like drowning men onto a raft. If the city chambers are still empty they’ll break in and squat. But they won’t be empty because I’ll be subletting them.”

  After a pause, the other voice said grudgingly, “Very clever. But aren’t you being a bit optimistic? You’re gambling on a trend that may not continue.”

  “What is there to stop it?”

  Lanark stood up, feeling terribly afraid. A short while ago he had told Sludden he was content. Now everything he heard or saw or remembered was pushing him toward panic. He desperately wanted Rima beside him, a Rima who would smile and be sad with him, a Rima whose fears he could soothe and who would not fling words at him like stones. He paid for the tea and went back to his own room and undressed. When jacket and jersey were removed he saw the right shirtsleeve was stiff with dried blood, and on taking off the shirt he found the arm was dragonhide from shoulder to wrist, with spots of it on the back of his hand. He put on his pyjamas, got into bed and fell asleep. There seemed nothing else to do.