Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [163]
“You were sent an invitation three weeks ago.”
“But I’ve not been home. I’m sleeping here just now.”
“Here?”
“I’ve a mattress behind that pew over there. How’s the engineering?”
“Oh, he gave that up a year ago. He’s in Dundee writing the sports page for the North East Courier.”
“Robert a journalist?”
“Aye. He was always keen on the writing.”
“He never told me that!”
“He didn’t want to. When you get onto your high horse, Duncan, nobody else gets a word in edgeways. Well, the Thomson press was advertising for journalists, and he sent them a story he’d written. I don’t know why, he was doing all right at engineering. Anyway, they took him on, and now he’s married a girl in one of their offices.”
“I must write to him.”
“Oh, you’ll never write to him. You’re too full of yourself. But I suppose that’s how people get on in the world … not that you seem to have got very far.”
She stared at the paint-stained dressing gown he wore on top of his overalls. His mother had made it from a thick grey army blanket and it was warm and draught-proof. He said awkwardly, “Tell Robert I’m sorry I missed the wedding.”
The pulpit was draught-proof with an electric foot warmer. In frosty weather he found it cosier sleeping curled on its octagonal floor than extended on the mattress, and grew so used to this that he continued there when spring came. Small corns embossed the palms of his hands from climbing the tubular steel. The ceiling was finished and the scaffolding removed before Easter, and now he worked from ladders upon the great wall facing the organ. One day Mr. Smail came and asked crisply, “When will you finish this, Duncan?”
“I don’t know.”
“But good heavens, you asked for three months and have taken seven! And the Presbytery are coming to inspect this in June and we should be arranging favourable publicity as soon as possible!”
After a pause Thaw said, “You can show it to journalists in a fortnight. It won’t be finished then, but it will look as if it is.”
“I have your solemn word on that?”
“Oh, yes, my solemn word, if you want it.”
When Mr. Smail left he climbed down and glumly considered the tall arched panel. At the top a phoenix sank into flames among the leaves and yellow fruit of the tree of life, whose branches sheltered crows, pigeons, wrens and squirrels. The straight dark trunk divided the wall in half and grew from a lawn in the foreground. Rabbits nibbled cowslips, a mole delved and a roe deer nursed her fawn. There was enough killing to keep predators alive and the herbivores jumpy: a fox brought a pheasant to its cubs, a tawny owl in the tree of knowledge held a vole in a claw while other voles played among dead leaves between the roots. The naked man and woman embracing under the great tree of knowledge were clearly reflected in a pool of rushes and irises. This pool, the source of a river, contained a salmon rising to a gnat and mosaic turrets of caddis larvae on weedy pebbles. So far he was satisfied. His trouble began in the background where history was acted in the loops and delta of the river on its way to the ocean. The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept popping in and having to be removed: God driving out Adam and Eve for learning to tell right from wrong, God preferring meat to vegetables and making the first planter hate the first herdsman, God wiping the slate of the world clean with water and leaving only enough numbers to start multiplying again, God fouling up language to prevent the united nations reaching him at Babel, God telling a people to invade, exterminate and enslave for him, then letting other people do the same back. Disaster followed disaster to the horizon until Thaw wanted to block it with the hill and gibbet where God, sick to death of his own violent nature, tried to let divine mercy into the world by getting hung as the criminal he was. It was comical to think he achieved that by telling folk to love and not hurt each other. Thaw groaned aloud and said, “I don’t enjoy hounding you like this, but I refuse to gloss the facts. I admire most of your work.