Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [160]
On Friday he was ill again. The night before, the ward sister had given him a hypodermic needle, cotton wool, surgical spirit and a rubber-capped adrenalin bottle. She had shown him how to use them and later his father arrived with clothes and money. Now he laboriously dressed, glanced unhappily at Mr. Clark (who was smoking again) and said goodbye to the minister. In the reception hall he phoned for a taxi, then huddled on the back seat, soothed by the sizzling of the tyres on the wet roads, for at last the weather had broken.
He got out at the art school and slowly climbed to the hall called “the museum” where several students were writing at tables. He filled the registration form for his final year and carried it down a corridor, noticing that the dark panelled walls, white plaster gods and tight-trousered girls no longer seemed excitingly solid but shallow, like a photograph of a once-familiar street. There was a queue outside the registrar’s door so he stepped into an empty studio and squirted six minims of adrenalin into his calf muscle. He entered the registrar’s office shortly after, feeling businesslike on the outside but relaxed and dreamy within. He handed over the form and was asked to sit down.
“Well, Thaw, how are you getting on?”
“Not badly, sir. I’ve been offered a really big job.” He explained about the mural and said, “Do you think I could work on it till Christmas?”
“I see no reason why not. When your diploma exam comes along next June the school could take the assessors to the church to see what you’ve done. Talk it over with Mr. Watt.”
“Can I tell him you approve of the idea?”
“No. I neither approve or disapprove; it has nothing to do with me. Mr. Watt is your head of department.”
“He may not want to give me permission.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“He has already allowed me a great deal of freedom—freedom to paint in my own studio, I mean.”
“Well?”
“I have nothing to show for it; no finished work, I mean.” “Why?”
“Ill health. But I’ve recovered now. If you like I can prove it with doctors’ certificates.”
The registrar sighed, rubbed his brow and said, “Go away, Thaw, go away. I’ll speak to Mr. Watt.”
“Thank you, Mr. Peel,” said Thaw, briskly standing. “That is abnormally decent of you.”
In the tram home he sat beside a lady with a shopping bag who eyed him for a while out of a sharp profile and at last said, “You’re Duncan Thaw, of course.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t remember me.”
“Were you a friend of my mother?”
“A friend of your mother? I was the best friend Mary Needham had. I worked beside her in Copland and Lyes long, long, long before your father appeared on the scene. Mind you,” she added musingly, “a lot of folk thought they were Mary’s best friend. She knew so many and they all trusted her. Neighbours would confide in her who hated each other like poison. But there, she’s gone. And so has your grampa, that good old man.”
Her tone irritated Thaw. He could hardly remember his mother’s father, a tall man with a white moustache who lived in a semi-detached villa a block away. The woman sighed and said, “Of course, your granny was the first to go. You were very fond of your granny.”
“Was I?” said Thaw, startled, because he couldn’t remember having a granny.
“Oh, yes. Whenever you quarrelled with your mother (you were always a difficult lad) you ran to your granny’s house and she petted and spoiled you and gave you everything you liked. You were very upset when she died. You would go to her back door and lie there crying for her.”
“Aren’t you mixing me with someone else?”
“Who else? Surely not your sister. She was barely two at the time. A wild girl, your sister.”
A moment later the woman chuckled and said, “Mind you, Mary was a wild one too in her day. Oh, she shocked me all right. I was one of the mousey kind. I remember two lads from haberdashery arranged to meet us at the Scott monument one Saturday. It was my