Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [116]
“All right.”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“I’m tired.”
“Did you get much in the way of materials?”
“A drawing board, a folder, cartridge paper, a metal-edged ruler. I … I had them stolen.”
“My God! How? How?”
Thaw told him how.
“And how much did they cost?”
Thaw put a hand in his pocket and grasped the crumpled invoice tight. “Nearly a pound.”
“Nearly a pound? Nearly a pound? How much did they cost?” “Fifteen shillings.”
Mr. Shaw stared at him disgustedly then said, “Never mind. Just get another lot on account tomorrow.”
In bed that night Thaw realized his father would expect the stolen goods to be replaced for fifteen shillings, so to keep his lie a secret he would need to save three pounds minus fifteen shillings multiplied by two. It struck him that if he had a key in the side of his head and could die by turning it, he would gladly turn it now.
Next morning he rose at seven, walked to school to save tram fares and dined on a cheap pie. This left him hungry but came to seem sufficient in two or three days, then he lost appetite for it and drank a cup of milk instead. Daily his stomach grew content with less. His mind was clenched, his surface reinforced against surrounding life. Normal hesitancies of voice and manner vanished. Often a line of words sounded in his head: clean bleak exact austere rigorous implacable. Sometimes he whispered these words as though they were a tune his body moved to. Walking down streets and corridors his feet hit the ground with unusual force and regularity. All sounds, even words spoken nearby, seemed dulled by intervening glass. People behind the glass looked distinct and peculiar. He wondered what they saw in gargoyles, masks and antique door knockers that they couldn’t see in each other. Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object, originally inherited, which they never tired of altering and adding to. Yet while he looked on people with the cold interest usually felt for things, the world of things began to cause surprising emotions. A haulage vehicle carrying a huge piece of bright yellow machinery swelled his heart with tenderness and stiffened his penis with lust. A section of tenement, the surface a dirty yellow plaster with oval holes through which brickwork showed, gave the eerie conviction he was beholding a kind of flesh. Walls and pavements, especially if they were slightly decayed, made him feel he was walking beside or over a body. His feet did not hit the ground less firmly, but something in him winced as they did so.
He could only rest when working properly. After sketching bulbs and boxes the class was given plants, fossils and small stuffed tropical birds. Thaw let his eyes explore like an insect the spiral architecture of a tiny seashell while his pencil point marked some paper with the eye’s discoveries. The teacher tried to correct him by rational argument. She said, “Are you trying to make a pattern out of this, Duncan? I wish you wouldn’t. Just draw what you see.”
“I’m doing that, Miss Mackenzie.”
“Then stop drawing everything with the same black harsh line. Hold the pencil lightly; don’t grip it like a spanner. That shell is a simple, delicate, rather lovely thing. Your drawing is like the diagram of a machine.”
“But surely, Miss Mackenzie, the shell only seems delicate and simple because it’s smaller than we are. To the fish inside it was a suit of armour, a house, a moving fortress.”
“Duncan, if I were a marine biologist I might care how the shell was used. As an artist my sole interest is in the appearance. I insist that it appears beautiful and delicate and should be drawn beautifully and delicately. There’s no need to show these little cracks. They’re accidental. Ignore them.”
“But Miss Mackenzie, the cracks show the shell’s nature—only this shell could crack in this way. It’s like the wart on Cromwell’s lip. Leave it out and it’s no longer a picture of Cromwell.”
“All right, but please don’t make the wart as important as the lip. You’ve drawn these cracks as clearly as the edges of the shell itself.”
Behind