Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [178]
He leaned his stomach on a baluster of the bridge and folded his arms on the parapet. He felt sick. The river had shrunk to a narrow trickle among cracked mudflats. A thin cloud of gulls screamed above something dead under the suspension bridge to the east. A subterranean murmuring began as a vibrration in the soles of the feet, increased until it thrummed on his eardrums and welled over the horizon like the thunder of a gong. He raised his head and saw the warehouses on the left bank. The city beyond them was growing into the sky. First the towers of the municipal building ascended, and beyond them the hump of Rotten Row with all the tenement windows lit, and then the squat cathedral spire with tower and nave and a nearby cluster of Royal infirmary domes and beyond those, like the last section of a telescope, the tomb-rotten pile of the Necropolis slid up with the John Knox column overtopping the rest. The book in the hand of the stone man struck across the throbbing planet and a blue shadow sped from the book to Thaw’s heart, chilling it. The city was forcing itself into the sky on every side. Factory, university, gasometer, slag-bing, ridges of tenements, parks loaded with trees ascended until he looked up at a horizon like the rim of a bowl with himself at the bottom. The rim was crowded with watchers. He felt a rage of self-pity that so many were focussing on as few as he and saluted them with two fingers. One of the watchers left the rim and passed down out of sight behind rooftops. Thaw shut his eyes and imagined her descending the streets like a water drop sliding down the side of a basin, then he walked over the bridge and met her at Paisley’s corner.
She smiled and took his arm and he was competent. He grinned to see himself shift his arm to her waist as they walked and how his remarks made her giggle. He flapped and tumbled in the air above their heads, helpless and screeching with laughter, then brought his beak close to an ear and made suggestions. They climbed a narrow road between staring crowds. Sometimes he recognized a face to the left or right, but he had to keep his whole attention on Marjory, feeding her with the talk which made her smile and being careful not to laugh. She did not notice that the hand holding hers was as senseless as granite and prevented by an effort from crushing her finger-bones. They crossed the rocking planks of the canal bridge, passed some warehouses and climbed a grassy slope. Thaw went first, pulling her behind. She was laughing when he forced her down and rubbed her body and neck with his stone hands. She struggled.
“Quick quick quick!” screamed the crow. “Cut her off quick.” He moved his stone mouth across her throat into the angle of the jaw near the ear and cut her off quick.
He woke in drizzling rain with a crust on his lips and something beside him he did not want to see. He attempted to fly home but was too breathless to do it for more than short distances, otherwise he crawled on the slimy towpath. Coming upstairs he kept falling from side to side and inside the house he lay on the lobby floor and started grunting, mainly for breath but partly for attention. He grunted louder and louder until a policeman broke the lock of the door. He expected to go to prison, but a doctor was there and they lifted and laid him in bed. The doctor gave a morphine injection and he fell into a sweet sleep. He woke in the Southern General Hospital and was nearly a fortnight there.
CHAPTER 30.
Surrender
Lanark stared through the ward window at a bed which seemed a reflection of his own except that the figure in it was under the sheets. He said, “Did Thaw really kill someone or was that another hallucination?”
I’m only able to tell the story as he saw it.
“But did the police arrest him?”
No. In hospital