CHAPTER 6.
Mouths
With no will to see anyone or do anything he immersed himself in sleep as much as possible, only waking to stare at the wall until sleep returned. It was a sullen pleasure to remember that the disease spread fastest in sleep. Let it spread! he thought. What else can I cultivate? But when the dragonhide had covered the arm and hand it spread no further, though the length of the limb as a whole increased by six inches. The fingers grew stouter, with a slight web between them, and the nails got longer and more curving. A red point like a rose-thorn formed on each knuckle. A similar point, an inch and a half long, grew on the elbow and kept catching the sheets, so he slept with his right arm hanging outside the cover onto the floor. This was no hardship as there was no feeling in it, though it did all he wanted with perfect promptness and sometimes obeyed wishes before he consciously formed them. He would find it holding a glass of water to his lips and only then notice he was thirsty, and on three occasions it hammered the floor until he waked up and Mrs. Fleck came running with a cup of tea. He felt embarrassed and told her to ignore it. She said, “No, no, Lanark, my husband had that before he disappeared.
You must never ignore it.”
He thanked her. She rubbed her hands on her apron as if drying them and said abruptly, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you get up, Lanark, and look for work? I’ve lost a husband by that”—she nodded to the arm—“and a couple of lodgers, and all of them, before the end, just lay in bed, and all of them were decent quiet fellows like yourself.”
“Why should I get up?”
“I don’t like talking about it, but I’ve an illness of my own—not what you have, a different one—and it’s never spread very far because I’ve had work to do. First it was a husband, then lodgers, now it’s these bloody weans. I’m sure if you get up and work your arm will improve.”
“What work can I get?”
“The Forge over the road is wanting men.”
Lanark laughed harshly and said, “You want me to make components for the Q39.”
“I know nothing about factory work, but if a man gets pay and exercise by it I don’t see why he should complain.”
“How can I go for work with an arm like this?”
“I’ll tell you how. My husband had the same trouble on exactly the same arm. So I knitted him a thick woollen glove and lined it with wash leather. He never used it. But if you wear it along with your jacket nobody will notice, and if they do, why bother? There are plenty of men with crabby hands.”
Lanark said, “I’ll think about it.”
He was prevented from saying more by the hand’s raising the teacup to his lips and holding it there.
Sometimes the children played on the floor of the room. He liked this. They were quarrelsome but they never explained what life was or persuaded him to do something, their selfishness did not make him feel wicked. At these times he felt ashamed of his great arm and kept it below the covers, but once he awoke to find it lying outside with the children squatting round it staring. The boy said admiringly, “You could murder someone with that.”
Lanark was ashamed because the thought had occurred to himself. He drew the arm out of sight and muttered without much conviction that two human hands would be better. The boy said, “Yes, but not in a fight.”
Lanark found the limb beginning to fascinate him. The colour was not really black but an intensely dark green. It looked diseased because it grew on a man, but considered by itself the glossy cold hide, the thorny red knuckles and elbow, the curving steel-blade claws looked very healthy indeed. He began to have fantasies about the damage it could do. He imagined entering the Elite and walking across to the Sludden clique with the hand inside the bosom of his jacket. He would smile at them with one side of his mouth, then expose the hand suddenly. As Sludden, Toal and McPake leapt to their feet he would knock them down with a sweeping sideways blow, then drive the squealing girls into a corner and rake the clothes off them. Then the image grew confused, for each of his fantasies tended to dissolve into another one before reaching a climax. After these dreams he would become dismally cold and depressed. Once he discovered himself stroking the cold right hand with the fingertips of the left and murmuring, “When I am all like this ….” But if he was all like that he would have no feeling at all, so he thought of Rima and her moments of kindness: the time in the truck when she touched him and said she was sorry, the dance and how they held each other, the moment in the fog when she laughed at him and slid her hand round his arm, the coffee she had made and even the jacket she had flung. But these memories were too feeble to restore human feeling, and he would return to admiring the feelingless strength of the dragonish limb until he fell asleep.
At last he wakened in pain which made him scream aloud. Mrs. Fleck ran in. A ragged wound had been torn in his side through the pyjama jacket, blood from it flooded the blankets. Lanark bit the thumb knuckle of his left hand to prevent further screaming and glared at the bloodstained claws of the right. Mrs. Fleck ran to get bandages and water but when she returned dragonhide had crystalized over the wound and Lanark sat on the bed pulling his clothes on. He said, “You spoke about a glove. Can I have it?”
She went to a lobby cupboard and took out her husband’s glove and an old waterproof coat. She helped Lanark put them on and he left the house.
Snow had fallen but thin rain was reducing it to slush. He had gone to bed because the alternatives were detestable and now he walked the streets because sleep was dangerous, choosing streets where the slush lay thinnest. Once again he came to the square. The ground-floor windows were alight in a building along one side of it, and hammering and sawing resounded within. Arched doors stood open, showing a marble-floored entrance hall with a red wooden hut in the middle. It was covered with posters saying YOU HAVEN’T MUCH TIME—PROTEST NOW. The words seemed meant for him, so he crossed the marble to the hut and stepped inside.
A thin, bearded man wearing a clerical collar and an old woman with wild white hair sat behind a counter putting pamphlets into envelopes. A young man with bushy hair typed rapidly at a table behind them, and an attractive girl sat on the table plucking idly at a guitar. As Lanark approached the counter the woman clasped her hands below her chin and looked at him with an encouraging smile. After hesitating awhile he said in a low voice, “I’m frightened of what’s happening to me.”
She nodded vigorously. “Yes! No wonder. If you’ve been looking around you’ll see we haven’t much time.”
“What can I do?”
“The primary need is to persuade others of the danger. When we have a majority we can act. Would you care to distribute some pamphlets for us?”
“That wouldn’t help. You see my arm is all—”
“Oh, we understand that! And we’re glad you came, even so. Please, please don’t believe we don’t care. We have launched this campaign because we care deeply. But for troubles of that personal kind hard work is the only answer, hard work for a decent cause. I’m sure if you sit down calmly and address those envelopes it will help more than you believe.”
Lanark pulled the glove off and showed her the right hand. Her round, pleasant face grew red but she smiled determinedly into his eyes and said, “You see, the only cure for these—personal—diseases is sunlight. Which our party is trying to restore. The artificially inflated land values at the centre have produced such overbuilding on the horizon that the sun is barely able to rise above it. As soon as we have a majority we can persuade the authorities to act.”
The bushy-haired young man had stopped typing to roll a cigarette. He said, “Ballocks. If we had a majority tomorrow the situation would be the same. A city is ruled by its owners. Nine tenths of our factories and houses are owned by a few financiers and landlords, with a bureaucracy and a legal system to defend them and collect the money. They are a minority and they are in power. Why should we wait until there are more of us before we seiz
e it? Numerically there are more of us already.”
The girl looked up from the guitar and said, “I think you’re being too hard on the boss class. They feel in their bones that the system is unfair and unwieldy, so the intelligent ones get terribly bored and join us. That’s what I did. My daddy’s a brigadier.”
“We contain all shades of opinion,” said the white-haired woman, becoming flustered, “but we are agreed upon one thing: the need for sunlight. You need that too, so why not join us?”
Lanark stared at her and she smiled bravely back but eventually shrugged her shoulders and resumed work with the envelopes. The clergyman beside her leaned forward toward Lanark and said in a low voice, “You’re on the edge of a pit, aren’t you?” In spite of the beard his face looked childish and eager, with a blue mark like a bruise above the right eyebrow. He said quietly, “People in this organization see the pit a long way ahead, so put your glove on, we can’t help you.” Lanark bit his underlip and pulled on the glove. The man said, “If you get out of the pit I hope you’ll join us all the same. You won’t need us then but we will certainly need you.”
Lanark said heavily, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and walked away.
He crossed the square and walked to the Elite because it was the only other place he could think of and Rima might be there. Her kindly moments had become radiant in the coldness he moved through, and she had dragonhide too, and what had it made of her? He leaped flooded gutters and plunged through ridges of slush; he pushed open the glass doors of the foyer and rushed upstairs, and the café was empty. He stood in the entrance and stared unbelievingly around but nobody was there, not even the man who had stood so fixedly behind the counter. Lanark turned and went downstairs.
Crossing the halfway landing he saw a girl below in the foyer buying cigarettes at the cash desk. It was Gay. He called her name and hurried down. She looked whiter and thinner but greeted him with surprising vivacity, bobbing lightly up to kiss his lips. She said, “Where have you been, Lanark? Why those mysterious disappearances?”
“I’ve been in bed. Come upstairs with me.”
“Upstairs? Nobody goes upstairs nowadays. It’s so horrible. We use the downstairs café now, the light is more soothing.” She pointed to a thick red curtain which Lanark had thought covered a door to the cinema. She pulled it slightly aside, saying, “Come and join us. All the old gang are here.”
Beyond the curtain was perfect blackness. Lanark said, “There’s no light here at all.”
“Yes there is, but your eyes take a while to get used to it.”
“And is Rima in there?”
Gay let the curtain go and said uneasily, “I don’t think I’ve seen Rima since my … my engagement party.”
“Then she’s at home?”
“I suppose so.”
“Could you tell me how to get to it? I went there in the fog and I couldn’t find it now.”
Gay’s face seemed suddenly ancient. She folded her arms, bowed her head and shoulders, looked at him sideways and said faintly, “I could take you there. But Sludden wouldn’t like it.”
“Take me there, Gay! She helped you when you were sick at the party. I’m afraid something is happening to her too.”
She gave him a sly, frightened look and said. “Sludden sent me to buy cigarettes and he hates waiting for anything.”
Lanark saw that his dragon hand was clenching to strike her. He thrust it into his pocket where it squirmed like a crab. Gay did not notice. She said wistfully, “You’re very solid, Lanark. I can go with you if you hold me, I think. But Sludden never lets go.”
She held out a hand to him. He seized it gladly and they went into the street.
Gay’s footsteps were so feeble that he put his good arm round her waist to help her onward. At first they went quickly, then the pressure on his arm began to increase. Her feet were not engaging the slippery pavement, and though her body was light it felt as if an elastic cord fixed to her back were making forward movement more difficult with each step. He paused for a moment under a lamppost, breathing hard from exertion. Gay put an arm round the pole to steady herself but seemed wholly placid. With a coy sideways look she said, “You’re wearing a glove on your right hand. I’ve got one on my left!”
“What about it?”
“I’ll show you my disease if you show me yours!”
He began to say he was not interested in her disease but she pulled off her fur gauntlet. Surprise gagged him. He had expected dragon claws like his own, but all he could see was a perfectly shaped white little hand, the fingers lightly clenched, until she unclenched them to show the palm. He took a moment to recognize what lay on it. A mouth lay on it, grinning sarcastically. It opened and said in a tiny voice, “You’re trying to understand things, and that interests me.”
It was Sludden’s voice. Lanark whispered, “Oh, this is hell!” Gay’s hand sank to her side. He saw that the soles of her feet were an inch above the pavement. Her body dangled before him as if from a hook in her brain, her smile was vacant and silly, her jaw fell and the voice which came from the mouth was not formed by movement of tongue or lip. Though it had a slightly cavernous echo it was Sludden’s voice, which said glibly, “It’s time we got together again, Lanark,” while a tiny identical voice from her left hand cried shrilly, “You worry too much about the wrong things.”
“Oh! Oh!” Lanark gabbled. “This is hell!”
He pressed gloved and ungloved hands to his mouth and without ceasing to stare at Gay’s dangling image stepped backward away from her. Like something sliding on a wire she quivered and moved backward too, slowly at first, then accelerating till he saw her emptily grinning face recede and dwindle to a point in the direction of the café.
He turned and ran.
He ran blindly till his foot slipped and he fell on the slushy pavement, bruising hip and shoulder and soaking his trousers. When he stood up the panic had been replaced by desperation. His wish to leave this city was powerful and complete and equalled by a certainty that streets and buildings and diseased people stretched infinitely in every direction. He was standing near railings with a bank of snow beyond them which the rain had not dissolved. Some naked trees grew out of it. The trees and snow had such a fresh look that he climbed the railings and waded upward between the trunks. The lamps in the street behind showed a dim hillside laid out as a cemetery. Black gravestones stood on the snowy paleness and he climbed between them, amazed that the ground of this place had once swallowed men in a natural way. He reached a path with a bench on it, brushed snow from the seat with his sleeve, then knelt and banged his brow hard there three times, crying from the centre of his soul, “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!” After a moment he stood up, dazed by the blows but indifferent to sodden clothes and aching body. He felt strangely buoyant. There was a yellow radiance among some obelisks on the hilltop, lighting the base of a few and silhouetting others, so he ran uphill.
The slope below the summit was unusually steep, and Lanark kept rushing up and slithering back until he gained the momentum to reach the top and stumble between two monuments onto flat ground. The summit was a circular plot with a ring of obelisks round the edge and a cluster of them in the middle. They were old and tall with memorials carved on the pedestals. He was puzzled by the light. It was a glow like the light from a steady fire, it lit nothing over five feet from the ground and cast no shadows, and Lanark walked round the central monuments without discovering a source. The glow was brightest on a pedestal near the place where he had entered the ring, so he examined it for a clue. It was a marble block erected by the workers and management of the Turks Road Forge in gratitude to a doctor who had rendered them skilled and faithful service between 1833 and 1879. Lanark was reading the inscription for a second time when he noticed a dim shadow across the centre of the stone. He glanced over his shoulder to see what cast it and saw nothing, though when he glanced back it looked like the shadow of a bird with outspread wings. But the colour d
eepened and he saw that the shape forming there was a mouth three feet wide, the lips meeting in a serene, level line. His heart beat now with an excitement which was certainly not fear. When the lips had fully formed they parted and spoke, and just as a single intense ray can dazzle an eye without lighting a room, so this voice pierced the ear without sounding loud. It pierced so painfully that he could not understand the syllables as they were spoken, but had to remember them when they stopped. The mouth had said, “I am the way out.”
Lanark said, “What do you mean?”
The lips pressed together in a line which seemed ruled on the stone and moved swiftly to the ground, crossing the projections of the base as simply as the shadow of a gull passes over a waterfall. It sped over the snow, then stopped and opened into an oval pit in front of his feet. The edges of the lips were shaded lightly on the snow but curved steeply down to the projecting tips of the perfect teeth. From the blackness between these rose a cold wind with the salty odour of rotting seaweed, then a hot one with an odour like roasting meat. Lanark shuddered with dread and giddiness. He remembered the mouth in Gay’s hand which had nothing behind it but a cold man being nasty to people in a dark room. He said, “Where will you take me?”
The mouth closed and became dim at the corners. He saw it was fading and would leave him on a hilltop in a city more sterile and lonely than anything a pit could hold. He shouted, “Stop! I’ll come!”
Lanark Page 6
