Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [118]
No one else at the table looked at each other. A voice in Thaw’s head raved at Macbeth, “Spit in her face! Go on, spit in her face!”
Macbeth looked down at his cigarette with a faint smile and said, “All right.”
“Oh Jimmy, you’re a pet.”
Thaw got up and walked home. The sun had set. He felt cold and light-bodied and the streets semed to flow through him on a current of dark air. Clock dials glowed like fake moons on invisible towers. On Alexandra Parade by the Necropolis a drunk man lurched past muttering, “Useless.”
“Right,” said Thaw. “Useless.”
He woke often that night to find his legs grinding against each other and his fingernails tearing healthy parts of his skin. In the morning the sheets were bloodstained and his body felt so heavy he had trouble bringing it out of bed. At school he went through the routines like a sleepwalker. At noon he went to the refectory and drank a cup of black coffee at a crowded table. A girl nearby shouted, “Hullo Thaw!”
He smiled feebly.
“Enjoying yourself, Thaw?”
“Well enough.”
“You like the life here, do you, Thaw?”
“Well enough.”
A boy leaned against her laughing, and whispered in her ear. She said, “Thaw, this man is saying rude things about you.”
The boy said quickly, “No, I’m not.”
Thaw said flatly, “I’m sure you’re not.”
He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage. He got quickly out of the tearoom trying to see nothing but the floor he walked on.
At home he stood in the kitchen after the evening meal, sometimes putting dishes away but mostly standing stock-still, his face open-mouthed and aghast. Mr. Thaw entered and said impatiently, “Haven’t you finished yet? You’ve been here over an hour. Is my company so disagreeable that you can’t share a room with me?”
“No, but I’m thinking things I don’t like to think about and I can’t stop.”
“What son of things?”
“Diseases, mostly. Skin diseases and cancers and insects that live in people’s bodies. Some of them are real but I’ve been inventing new ones. I can’t stop.”
“For God’s sake do your homework or go for a walk. Do something, at any rate.”
“How can I, with my mind full of these things?”
“Then go to bed.”
“But when I shut my eyes I see them. They’re so active. They gnaw and gnaw. Surely this is how people go mad.”
Mr. Thaw stared at his son with mingled impatience and worry. “Will I call the doctor then?”
“How would that help? ‘Doctor Tannahill, I’m havingthoughts I don’t like to think!’ How would that help?”
“He might send you to a psychiatrist.”
“When? I’m thinking these things now.”
“But what makes you think them?”
“That’s easy. I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that. Frustration. If a man hath these two, honesty and intelligence, and hath not sex appeal, then he is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.”
“You’re talking hysterically.”
“Yes. That’s unlucky, isn’t it?”
“Get to bed, Duncan, and I’ll bring you a toddy.”
He sat in bed propped