Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [232]
“By air.”
“But do I cross a zone, I mean an incaldrical zone, I mean—”
“An intercalendrical zone? Yes, you do.”
“Won’t that age me a lot?”
“Probably.”
“I’m not going. I want to stay near Sandy. I want to help him grow up.”
“I understand that,” said Sludden gravely. “But if you love your son—if you love Rima—you’ll work for them in Provan.”
“My family isn’t in the danger area now. It’s living with you.” Sludden smiled painfully, stood up and walked the floor of the cubicle. He said, “I will tell you something only one other person knows. You’ll have to be quiet about it till you reach Provan, but then you must tell the world. The whole of the Greater Unthank region is in danger, and not just from a typhoid epidemic, though that is probable too. Mrs. Schtzngrm has analyzed a sample of the poison—two firemen died getting it for her—and she says it has begun filtering down through the Permian layer. As you probably know, the continents, though not continuous with it, are floating on a superdense mass of molten—”
“Don’t blind me with science, Sludden.”
“If the pollution isn’t cleared up we’re going to have tremors and subsidences in the earth’s crust.”
“Something must be done!” cried Lanark, aghast.
“Yes. The knowledge of what to do belongs to the institute. The machinery to do it belongs to the creature. Only the council can force them to act together.”
“I’ll go,” said Lanark quietly, and mainly to himself. “But first I must see the boy.”
“Get dressed in the vestry and I’ll take you to him,” said Sludden briskly. “And by the way, if you’ve no objection we’ll have you declared provost: Lord Provost of Greater Unthank. It doesn’t mean anything—I’ll still be senior executive officer—but you’ll be going among people with titles, and a title of your own helps to impress that kind.”
Lanark pulled on the old greatcoat like a dressing gown, thrust his bare feet into the mud-caked shoes and followed Sludden downstairs to the vestry. His feelings were pulled between a piercing sad love for Sandy and an excited love of his own importance as a provost and delegate. Nothing interrupted the colloquy between these two loves. A warm bath was ready for him, and afterward he sat in a bathrobe while Jack shaved and trimmed him and Frankie manicured his fingernails. He put on clean new underwear, socks, shirt, a dark blue necktie, and a three-piece suit of light grey tweed, and beautifully polished black shoes; then he withdrew to the lavatory, excreted into a plastic chamberpot fitted inside the lavatory pan and had the comfortable feeling that someone else was expected to empty it. There was a mirror above the blocked lavatory sink; a medicine cabinet with a mirror for a door hung on the wall facing it. By moving the door to an angle he managed to see himself in profile. Jack had removed the beard and trimmed the moustache. His greying hair, receding from the brow, swept into a bush behind the ears: the effect was impressive and statesmanlike. He placed his hands on his hips and said quietly, “When Lord Monboddo says that the council has done its best for Unthank he is lying to us—or has been lied to by others.”
He returned to the vestry and Sludden escorted him out to a long black car by the cathedral door. They climbed into the back seat and Sludden said, “Home, Angus,” to the chauffeur.
They sped swiftly through the city and Lanark was too occupied with himself to notice much, except when the pervading stink grew unusually strong as the car crossed the riverbed by a splendid new concrete bridge. Heaps of bloated black plastic bags were scattered across the cracked mud. Sludden said glumly, “Nowhere else to dump them.”
“On television you said these bags were odour-proof.”
“They are, but they burst easily.”
They came to a private housing scheme of neat little identical bungalows, each