Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [195]
“Don’t touch! It’s horrible!”
“How did they come here? We left them beside the chariots. They can’t have crawled along the road to meet us.”
“Can any dreadful thing not happen here?”
“Be sensible, Rima. Strange things have happened here but nothing dreadful. This fungus is a form of life, like you and me.”
“Like you, perhaps. Not like me.”
Lanark was fascinated. Peering closely he moved round the cluster and felt his ankles brushed by something light.
“And, Rima, here’s ferns and grass.”
“What’s wonderful about grass?”
“It’s better than a desert full of rusty wheels. Come on, there’s a slope. Let’s climb it.”
“Why? My back’s sore, and you’re supposed to be tired.”
Beyond the toadstools the road vanished under an overgrown embankment. Lanark scrambled upward and Rima, grumbling, came after.
They climbed through gorse, brambles and bracken, feeling glad of the protective coats. The white mist faded until they emerged into luminous darkness under an immense sky of stars. They stood beside a ten-lane motorway which lay across the mist like a causeway across an ocean of foam. Vehicles were whizzing along too quickly to be recognized: tiny stars in the distance would suddenly expand, pass in a blast of wind, shrink to stars on the opposite horizon, and vanish. There was a thirty-feet-high road sign on the grassy verge:
: “Good,” said
Lanark happily. “We’re on the right road at last. Come on.”
“It seems a general rule that when I’m able to walk you feel exhausted and when I need a rest you keep dragging me along.” “Are you really tired, Rima?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Me tired? What a strange idea.”
“Good. Come along, then.”
As they started walking a glow appeared on the misty horizon to their left and a globe of yellow light slid up into the sky from behind a jagged black mountain. Rima said, “The moon!” “It can’t be the moon. It’s going too fast.”
The globe was certainly marked like the moon. It swung upward across Orion, passed near the Pole Star and sunk down below the horizon on the far side of the road. A little later, with a piece of rim missing from one side, it rose again behind the mountain on the left. Rima stood still and said desperately “I can’t go on. My back hurts, my stomach’s swollen, and this coat is far too tight.”
She unbuttoned it frantically and Lanark stared in surprise. The dress had hung loose from her shoulders, but now her stomach was swollen almost to her breasts and the amber velvet was as tight as the skin of a balloon. She gazed down as if struck by something and said faintly, “Give me your hand.”
She pressed his hand against the lower side of her belly, staring wildly at his face. He had begun to say, “I feel nothing,” when his palm received, through the tense stomach wall, a queer little pat. He said, “Somebody is in there.”
She said hysterically, “I’m going to have a baby!”
He gaped at her and she glared accusingly back. He struggled to keep serious and failed. His face was stretched by a huge happy grin. She bared her teeth and shrieked, “You’re glad! You’re glad!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”
In a low intense voice she said, “How you must hate me….” “I love you!”
“… grinning when I’m going to have horrible pains and will split open and maybe die …”
“You won’t die!”
“… beside a fucking motorway without a fucking doctor in fucking sight.”
“We’ll get to Unthank before then.”
“How do you know?”
“And if we don’t I’ll take care of you. Births are natural things, usually.”
She knelt on the grass, covered her face and wept hysterically while Lanark started helplessly laughing, for he felt a burden lifted from him, a burden he had carried all his life without noticing. Then he grew ashamed and knelt and embraced her, and she allowed him. They squatted a long time like that.
CHAPTER 34.
Intersections
When he next looked at the sky a half-moon was sailing over it. He said, “Rima, I think we should