Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [177]
He wakened in the air above his body which lay with open mouth and eyes, the head lolling sideways off the pillow. He wondered whether to leave it but it moved, groaned, and at once he became part of it and sat up. He was full of dull peace. No noise came from the main road outside, not the faintest sound from upstairs or down. Air flowed in and out of his lungs so easily that he would have imagined himself dead if he hadn’t felt hungry. He pulled the heavy bedclothes aside, lowered his feet to the floor, tried carefully to stand and fell down. He lay awhile with his head under a chair, shuddering with laughter, and later drew his clothes on without standing and crawled into the kitchen, shaking his head from side to side and muttering, “All for a bit of skin, all for a bit of dried skin.” Pulling himself upright with difficulty he ate two oatcakes, washed and ate a shrivelled carrot, and that was all his stomach could hold. He sat on a chair and tried to arrange the thoughts in his head like pieces on a chessboard, but the thoughts were few and small and kept slipping between his fingers, so he stared at a spider which sat on the electric stove twitching far too many legs. He loathed it and brought the weight of his clenched fist down on it, yet when he withdrew the hand the insect sat there, twitching and unhurt. He struck many times in a fit of rage but the blows did not flatten it, and he stopped when the metal-topped stove had bruised his fist.
Suddenly words came to him out of the air, whispered by an invisible beak. He became tense, said “Yes,” walked upright out of the house, shut the door behind him and started fingering his pockets to learn if he had the key.
“Too many pockets,” he mumbled. “Must sew some up. Oh.” Mrs. Colquhoun’s cat sat in the opposite doorway looking at him. Part of her head and throat was missing. The right side was cut away and he saw the brain in section, white and pink and pleated like the underneath of a mushroom. The cat yawned, opening her half-mouth wide and unrolling her tongue across the white needle teeth. Thaw could see the tongue down to its root in the thin corridor of her throat. His lips moved, speaking indistinct words about his terror. His fingers shut upon the key’s cold steel. Clutching it for comfort he went down to the street. The air was warm and the sky as black as tar. A red planet in the middle put out rings of dark air like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. Thaw obeyed the whisper and turned left. The whisperer was a black crow which flew behind his head. In the great silence its orders were very distinct. He was himself that black bird looking down on Duncan Thaw and the streets he walked through. Sometimes he soared to the end of a street, leaving the small walking figure behind, or he would drop back and follow at a distance. At corners he came up, bringing his beak close to an ear to whisper: turn this way, turn that. At the end of one street a rusty gate was chained shut and twined with convolvulus, but he squeezed between some bent railings. He saw the crimson planet between pagoda-shaped growths whose brittle fleshy stalks sweated white syrup. The crow flapped up the cinder path in front of his feet, chattering wildly:
“Eenty teenty haligalum the head is hatched, the sky is crackit and John Knox boozed up a kee-kark lum and all the Gods are humpy-kee-kark, kee-kark, kee-kark.”
Thaw staggered, slipped and was flying. The crow soared a hundred feet below him. His position and speed depended on it. They passed above the dull ribbon of the weedy canal and he saw into rooms where women ironed beneath pulleys