Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [170]
When he got inside the room was visibly whirling. He closed his eyes and felt it drop like a crashing aeroplane. He fell to the wall, then to the floor. He embraced the narrow part of the lavatory pan and lay shivering and wishing he was unconscious. Whenever he opened his eyes he saw the room whirl: when he closed them he felt it fall. There were hammerings and voices shouting, “Open the door,” but he said, “Go away, I’m cold,” and after a while they went away. Later he heard such an odd scratching and tapping that he sat up. The tapping was mingled with faint cries of “Let me in!” and the bluster of strong wind. There was a white mouthing face behind the black glass of the window and he felt a pang of superstitious terror, for he remembered the lavatory was on the second or third floor. At last he crawled over, reached up a hand and raised a catch. The window swung in and Drummond jumped through with a gust of rain. He said, “Don’t worry, Duncan,” and wiped Thaw’s face and shirt with a sponge. Thaw said, “I’m cold, leave me alone.”
Two people helped him downstairs through an empty house. A door was opened and he was taken into a dark shed with a concrete floor. He screamed, “This is a cold place, I don’t want to be here.”
He was laid on the skin of a cold sofa, some doors slammed and a voice said, “Where do you live?”
“Cowlairs Parish Church.”
“For Christ’s sake where does he live?”
A voice gave an address on the Cumbernauld Road and the sofa throbbed and swung forward. It was clearly part of a car, and when it stopped outside the close in Riddrie he was able to get out and walk upstairs alone. Luckily his father no longer lived there.
A week later he recovered enough self-esteem to return to the church. The mural broke upon him in an altogether fresh way. He chuckled and skipped about, looking at it from different angles, his mind brightening with new ideas. He was laying paint on his palette when the minister came in. He said, “You took a holiday, Duncan. Good. You needed a rest…. I’m afraid I have bad news. The Glasgow Presbytery have been here and … they’ve seen it and they’re not very happy. Of course, our publicity was bad and the colour of Adam was rather a shock. I told them you could change that, but it was the principle of the thing they disliked. I’m afraid we’re going to lose our church.”
Anger flooded Thaw’s veins with adrenalin. He laid his ladder against the wall and said, “When?”
“In another six or seven months. Sometime early in the coming year.”
“At least it gives me time to finish the mural,” said Thaw, mounting the ladder.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stop.”
“Why?” said Thaw, staring.
“We’ve had complaints from the congregation. They’d like to worship without this mess of ladders and pots and drips on the chancel floor. The session say you must stop. Even Mr. Smail says so, and he was a great supporter of yours.”
“When?”
“Next Sunday.”
On Sunday the minister came an hour before the service and said, “Well, Duncan.”
Thaw climbed wearily down the ladder for he’d been working all night. He said, “That’s the best I can do in the time.”
“It looks just fine.”
“If anyone wonders about these marks tell them they would have become a herd of cattle.”
“Oh, no one will ask. It looks fine.”
“And if they say the sky is cluttered, tell them I meant to simplify it.”
“It’s beautiful, Duncan, but you could be an eternity on it. An eternity.”
“And if they say the events on the horizon distract from the big simple foreground shapes, tell them I’d begun to notice that, but this was my first mural, I’d seen nobody else paint one, and I’d to teach myself as I went along. Tell them I couldn’t afford assistants.”
The minister hesitated, then said firmly,