Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  “I am pleased to encounter you, sir,” said a quiet, bald man with rimless spectacles, shaking Lanark’s hand. “Kodac, Timon Kodac of South Atlantis. God knows why they chose me as a delegate. My true field is research, for Algolagnics. But it’s nice to visit other continents. My mother’s people hailed from Unthank.”

  Lanark nodded and thought, ‘She is smiling at me just as Libby smiled. I thought Libby meant to seduce me but she had a boyfriend. All young attractive healthy girls have young attractive healthy boyfriends. I’ve heard that young girls prefer older men, but I’ve never seen it.’

  “That’s a very good woman you’ve got,” said Kodac.

  Lanark stared at him. Kodac said, “That little old professor. What’s her name? Schtzngrm. That was quite a report she sent to the council. You know, the preliminary report with the Permian deep pollution samples. It made us sit up, in Algolagnics, when we got word of it. Oh, yes, we have our sources.”

  Lanark smiled, nodded and sipped. He thought, ‘Surely her face is making me smile at her? It’s so merry and intelligent, so quick to be surprised and amused. I will smile, but not much. A leader should be an audience, not a performer. His crowd should feel he is noticing, assessing, appreciating them, but from a position of strength.’

  Kodac said, “Of course what interests us is her final report, giving the locations. I believe you are seeing Wilkins tomorrow. He’s a very, very shrewd man, best man the council owns. We have a lot of respect for Wilkins at Algolagnics. So far we’ve always been one or two paces ahead of him, but it’s been a hassle. By the way, a lot of us in Algolagnics feel Unthank has had a pretty raw deal from the council. It doesn’t surprise us that you and Sludden are taking an independent line. More power to you! And speaking unofficially, I know these are also the sentiments of the Tunc-Quidative and Quantum-Cortexin clusters. But I suppose they’ve told you that?”

  Lanark nodded gravely and thought, ‘If she knew what her odd, thoroughly alive young face makes me feel, and how I envy the seam in her jeans which goes down over her stomach and over the little mound between the thighs and through and up between behind … if she knew how much less than a leader I am, I would bore her. I must give her the same smile I am giving this bald man who is hinting something: the knowing smile which tells them I know more than they know I know.’

  “Hey!” said Kodac chuckling. “See that little tulip watching you over there? Bet you she would go like a bomb. Yes, I’m sure Wilkins is just wild to get his hands on that final report of yours. If he knows it exists. Does he?”

  Lanark stared at him. Kodac laughed, patted Lanark’s shoulder and said, “A straight question at last, eh? I’m sorry, but though government and industry are interlocking we ain’t fully interlocking. Not yet. We support each other because order is Heaven’s first law, but remember Costaguana? Remember when the Occidental Republic split off from it? That could never have happened without our support. Of course we weren’t called Algolagnics then; that was in the time of the old Material Interests Corporation. Boy, what a gang of pirates they were! And the mineral was silver, which doesn’t thrust as hard as a certain other mineral, you follow?”

  Lanark smiled bitterly and thought, ‘The only feeling she gives me is stony pain, the pain of being slightly alive in a pot-bellied old body with thinning hair. But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves. Sludden was wise to send me. I can never melt.’

  “Your glass is empty,” said Kodac, taking it. “I’ll find a girl to fill it; I need a drink myself.”

  “Don’t be nasty to me, Lanark,” said the other Joy, smiling in front of him. “You promised me two dances, remember? Surely you can give me one?”

  Without waiting for a reply she drew him out among the dancers.

  Bitterness fell from him. The firm bracelet of her fingers round his wrist gave lightness and freedom. He laughed and held her waist, saying, “And Gay is your mother? Has the wound in her hand healed?”

  “Was she ever wounded? She never tells me anything.”

  “What does she do nowadays?”

  “She’s a journalist. Let’s not talk about her; surely I’m enough for you?”

  Holding her was hard, at first, for the music was so quick and jerky that the other men and women danced without touching each other. Lanark danced to the slower sound of the whole room, whose main noise was conversation. Heard all together the conversations sounded like a waterfall blattering into a pool and made the orchestra seem the chirping of excited insects. At first the other dancers collided with him but later they moved to the side of the floor and stood cheering and clapping. The orchestra lapsed raggedly into silence and the other Joy broke away and ran into the crowd. He followed her through laughter to his group and found her talking vigorously to the other girls. She faced him and asked, “Was that not nearly incest?”

  He stared at her. She said, “You are my father, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, no! Sludden is. Probably.”

  “Sludden? My mother never tells me anything. Who is Sludden? Is he successful? Is he good-looking?”

  Lanark said gently, “Sludden is a very successful man, and women find him very attractive. Or used to. But I don’t want to talk about him tonight.”

  He turned sadly away and looked at the crowded gallery where the dancing had resumed. On the faces of all these strangers he saw such familiar expressions of worry, courage, happiness, resignation, hope and failure that he felt he had known them all his life, yet they had surprising variety. Each seemed a world with its own age, climate and landscape. One was fresh and springlike, another rich, hot and summery. Some were mildly or stormily autumnal, some tragically bleak and frozen. Someone was standing by his side and her company let him admire these worlds peacefully, without wanting to conquer or enter them. He heard her sigh and say, “I wish you were more careful,” and he turned and saw Lady Monboddo. Her face looked younger, more solemn and lonely than he remembered. Her breasts were bigger and a floor-length gown of stiff tapestry patterned with lions and unicorns gave her a pillar-like look. Lanark said gladly, “Catalyst!”

  “That was my job, not my name. I think you should leave this place and go to bed, Lanark.”

  “I would, if I could go with you,” said Lanark, placing an arm round her waist. She frowned at him as though his face was a page she was trying to read. He withdrew his arm awkwardly and said, “I’m sorry if I’m greedy, but I don’t think these little girls like me much. And you and I were nearly very good friends once.”

  “Yes. We could have done anything we liked together. But you ran away to a dragon-bitch.”

  “But good came of it!” said Lanark eagerly. “She didn’t stay a dragon long and we have a son now. He’s very tall and healthy for his age, and seems intelligent too, and may be quite a kind person when he grows up.”

  She still stared at his face as if trying to read it. He looked away, saying uncomfortably, “Don’t worry about me. I’m not drunk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  When he looked back she had gone and Martha stood there offering a glass and saying, “I mixed this one. It doesn’t taste very nice but it’s strong. Please, sir, will it soon be time for me to dance with you?”

  “Why do you girls keep replacing each other?” said Lanark moodily, “I’ve had no time to know any of you yet.”

  “We think a lot of new friends can have more fun together than a pair of old friends.”

  “So when will you leave me?”

  “Maybe I’ll stay with you. Tonight,” said Martha, looking at him unsmilingly.

  “Maybe!” said Lanark sceptically, and drank.

  At first the taste was sickly sweet and then so appallingly bitter that he gulped it hastily. Somewhere he could hear Powys saying “… wants the council to ban the manufacture of footwear, because the earth, you see, is like the body of a mother, and direct contact with her keeps us healthy and sane. He says the recent increase in
warfare and crime is caused by composition rubber shoe soles which insulate us from the cthonic current and leave us a prey to the lunar current. Once I would have laughed, of course, but modern science is reinstating so much that we regarded as superstition. It seems that hedgehogs really do suck the teats of cows….”

  Lanark was lying outspread on cushions upon the lowest floor of all. Someone had removed his shoes and his feet gently explored the softer parts of a silk-clad body. His cheek lay on another one, each hand was snug between a pair of canvas-covered thighs and someone caressed his neck. The sounds of the gallery and orchestra were subdued and distant but he could hear two people talking high above his head.

  “It’s nice to see women combining to make a man feel famous.”

  “Drivel. They’re making him a sot.”

  “I believe he comes from a region where coitus is often reached through stupefaction.”

  “And just as often missed.”

  “I hate these voices,” said Lanark. There was whispering and he was gently raised and helped forward. A door closed somewhere and all noises stopped.

  He said loudly “I am walking … along a corridor.”

  Someone whispered, “Open your eyes.”

  “No. Touch tells me you are near me but eyes talk about the space between.”

  Another door closed and he lay down among whispers like falling leaves and felt his clothes removed. Someone whispered “Look!” and he opened his eyes long enough to meet a thin-lipped small smiling mouth in a glade of dark hair. Softly, sadly, he revisited the hills and hollows of a familiar landscape, the sides of his limbs brushing sweet abundances with surprisingly hard tips, his endings paddling in the pleats of a wet wound which opened into a boggy cave where little moans bloomed like violets in the blackness. There were dank odours and even a whiff of dung. Losing his way he lay on his back feeling that he too was a landscape, a dull flat one surrounding a tower sticking up into a dark and heavy sky. In the darkness above he felt people climbing off and onto his tower and swinging there with rhythmical gasps or shrieks. He hoped they were enjoying themselves and was glad of the company, and he kissed and caressed to show this; then everything turned over and he was the heavy sky pressing the tower into the land below, yet he felt increasingly lost, knowing the tower could stand for hours and never fire a gun. Someone whispered, “Won’t you give yourself?”

  “I can’t. Half my strength is locked in fear and hatred.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How would you like to show it?”

  “I would like to … I can’t say. You’d be disgusted.”

  “Tell us.”

  “I would like … I can’t tell you. You would laugh.”

  “Risk it.”

  “I want you to hate and fear me too, but be unable to escape. I want you captured and bound, and waiting helplessly in perfect dread for the slash of my whip, the touch of my branding iron. And then, at the climax of your terror, what enters you is simply naked me—ah! You would have … to … be … de … lighted. Then.”

  The land and foundation melted and he was thrusting, biting, grunting and clutching among squealing jelly meats like a carnivorous pig with fingers. Later on, feeling expended, he lay again in kindness gently rooting in soft clefts, rocking and drifting on smoothness, afloat and basking in softness. He clasped a waist, his penis nestled between two gentle mounds and he was filled with kind nowhere.

  He was knee-deep in a cold quick little burn gurgling over big rounded stones, some black, some grey, some speckled like oatmeal. He was tugging some of the stones out and carefully flinging them onto the bank a yard or two upstream where Alexander, about ten years old, very brown, and wearing red underpants, was building a dam with them. The hot sun on Lanark’s neck, the chill water round his legs, the ache in his back and shoulders suggested he had been doing this for a long time. He hauled out an extra large black and dripping boulder, heaved it into the heather, then climbed up and lay flat on his back beside it, breathing hard. He closed his eyes against the profound blue and the dazzle came hot dark red through his lids. He could hear the water and the click of stones. Alexander said, “This water keeps getting through.”

  “Plug the holes with moss and gravelly stuff.”

  “I don’t believe in God, you know,” said Alexander.

  Lanark blinked sideways and watched him wrenching clods from the bank. He said, “Oh?”

  “He doesn’t exist. Grampa told me.”

  “Which Grampa? Everyone has two.”

  “The one who fought in France in the first war. Give me a lot of that moss.”

  Without sitting up Lanark plucked handfuls from a dank mossy cushion nearby and chucked them lazily over. Alexander said, “The first war was the most interesting, I think, even though it had no Hitler or atomic bombs. You see, it mostly happened in one place, and it killed more soldiers than the second war.” “Wars are only interesting because they show how stupid we can be.”

  “Say that son of thing as much as you like,” said Alexander amiably, “but it won’t change me. Anyway, Grampa says there isn’t a God. People invented him.”

  “They invented motorcars too, and there are motorcars.”

  “That’s nothing but words…. Shall we go for a walk? I can show you Rima, if you like.”

  Lanark sighed and said, “All right, Sandy.”

  He stood up while Alexander climbed out of the burn. Their clothes lay on a flat rock and they had to shake small red ants off them before dressing. Alexander said, “Of course my real name is Alexander.”

  “What does Rima call you?”

  “Alex, but my real name is Alexander.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “Good.”

  They walked down the burn to a place where it vanished into a dip in the moor. Lanark saw it fall from his feet down a reddish rock into a pool at the head of a deep glen full of bushes and trees, mostly birch, rowan and small oaks. A couple, partly screened by the roots of a fallen mountain ash, lay on some grass beside the pool. The woman seemed asleep and Lanark saw more of the man, who was reading a newspaper. He said, “That isn’t Sludden.”

  “No, that’s Kirkwood. We don’t see Sludden nowadays.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sludden became too dependent.”

  “Kirkwood isn’t?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Sandy, do you think Rima would like to see me?”

  Alexander looked uncertainly into the glen, then pointed the other way saying, “Wouldn’t you like to walk with me to the top of that hill?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  They turned and walked uphill toward a distant green summit. Alexander flung himself down for a rest at the top of the first slope and did the same thing halfway up the next. Soon he was resting for two minutes every minute or two. Lanark said irritably, “You don’t need as much rest as this.” “I know how much rest I need.”

  “The sun won’t hang around the sky forever, Sandy. And it bores me, sitting still so often.”

  “It bores me walking all the time.”

  “Well, I’ll go on at a slow steady pace and you catch up with me when you like,” said Lanark, standing up.

  “Yah!” cried Alexander on a strong whining note. “You must be right all the time, mustn’t you? You won’t leave anyone in peace, will you? You have to spoil everything, haven’t you?” Lanark lost his temper, thrust his face toward Alexander’s and hissed, “You hate visiting the country, don’t you?”

  “Have I been howling and whining like this all the time? If I hated the country I would have been, wouldn’t I?”

  “Stand up.”

  “No. You’ll hit me.”

  “I certainly will not. Stand up!”

  Alexander stood up, looking worried. Lanark went behind him, gripped his body under the armpits and with a strong heave managed to sit him on his shoulders. Staggering slightly he set off through a plantat
ion of tiny fir trees. A minute later Alexander said, “You can put me down now.”

  Lanark plodded on up the slope.

  “I said you can put me down. I can walk now.”

  “Not till … we leave … these trees.”

  The weight at first had been so heavy that Lanark told himself he would only walk ten paces, but after that he went another ten, and then another, and now he thought happily, ‘I could carry him forever by taking ten steps at a time.’ But he put him down at the far side of the plantation and rested on the heather while Alexander hurried ahead. Eventually Lanark followed and overtook him on a ridge where heather and coarse brown grass gave place to a carpet of turf. The land here dipped into a hollow then rose to the steep cone of the summit. Alexander said, “You see that white thing on top?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a triangle point.”

  “A triangulation point.”

  “That’s right, a triangule point. Come on.”

  Alexander started straight toward the summit. Lanark said, “Stop Sandy, that’s the difficult way. We’ll take this path to the right.”

  “The straight way in the shortest, I can see it is.”

  “But it’s the steepest too. This path keeps to the high ground, it will save a lot of effort.”

  “You go that way then.”