Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [136]
“Do you, Duncan?”
The handhold was mainly pleasing for symbolic reasons, but where their shoulders touched so soft a silence and relaxation flowed into him that his mind bathed in vacancy for a while, untroubled by thoughts of what to do when they reached her house.
They paused at the garden gate. She shut her eyes suddenly and tilted her blind face upward. He put his mouth on hers. After a moment she slipped away, saying “Goodnight, Duncan.”
“Goodnight—I’ll see you tomorrow, won’t I?”
“Yes, tomorrow. Goodnight.”
He walked thoughtfully home, for the last tram had gone. Frost stiffened the substance of the pavement so that his feet hit the glittering surface with a tweeting note. Crossing the hill by the university he was struck by the clarity of the stars. They were not like lights stippling the inner surface of a dome but like galactic chandeliers hung at different levels in black air. He felt vaguely happy, yet vaguely puzzled and flat, and very cold. The kiss had meant nothing, nothing books, films and gossip had made him expect. Was it his fault? Or Marjory’s? Did it matter? He reached home, went to bed and slept.
He was standing on the golf course of Alexandra Park shortly after dawn, listening to a lark in the grey air overhead. The song stopped and the bird’s corpse thumped onto the turf at his feet. He walked downhill through a litter of sparrows and blackbirds on the paths to the gate. On Alexandra Parade a worker’s tram, apparently empty, groaned past the traffic lights. He watched the lights change from red and amber to green, then to green and amber, and then go out. The tramcar came to a halt.
Not everything died at once for the lowlier plants put on final spurts of abnormal growth. Ivy sprouted up the Scott monument in George Square and reached the lightning conductor on the poet’s head; then the leaves fell off and the column was encased in a net of bone-white bone-hard fibre. Moss carpeted the pavements, then crumbled to powder under his feet as he walked alone through the city. He was happy. He looked in the windows of pornography shops without wondering if anyone saw him, and rode a bicycle through the halls of the art galleries arid bumped down the front steps, singing. He set up easels in public places and painted huge canvases of buildings and dead trees. When a painting was completed he left it confronting the reality it depicted. The weather had also died. There was no rain or wind. The sky was always grey and warm and the time mid-afternoon.
He sat in the courtyard of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh painting a view of Arthur’s Seat. A harsh beak whispered gratingly in his left ear, “This is all much as Queen Mary remembered it.”
A white speck appeared high on the crags and moved down the path toward the courtyard’s southern gate. A load of depression settled in his heart. He leaned toward the canvas and worked with his face against it, determined to see nobody. A chilling shock went through him and he knew she had laid her hand on the back of his neck. He tried to ignore her but work was intolerable under her suffering eyes, so he motioned her to stand before the easel. She did so, thinking he meant to put her in the picture. He took a rifle and shot her. She stared at him reproachfully, then broke, crumpled, crumbled into a turd.
Great beetles emerged. The city was full of them. They were five feet long and shaped like rowing boats with antennae and had mouths in their stomachs. They were in every building throwing furniture and the bodies of the dead out of the windows. They feared open spaces and crossed these at a quick scuttling run. In the angle between a wall and pavement Thaw crouched between two who flickered their antennae incuriously over him. Since they had no eyes they thought him one of themselves as he squatted down and moved as they did.
He awoke with a chill that kept him in bed for a week.
CHAPTER 24.
Marjory Laidlaw
Convalescence was sweetened by the thought of Marjory and he returned to school full of anxious hope. Once again he was standing on the staircase talking