Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [266]
He was in a square room with cement floor and tiled walls like a public lavatory. It seemed large, perhaps because the only furniture was a lavatory pan in one corner without seat or handle to flush it. He lay in the diagonally opposite corner on part of the floor raised a foot above the rest and covered with red linoleum. The door of the place had a metal surface, and he knew it was locked. He had a headache and felt filthy and was sure something dreadful had happened. He pulled the blankets around him and huddled up, biting the thumb knuckle and trying to think. His main feeling was of filth, disorder and loss. He had lost someone or something, a secret document, a parent, or his self-respect. The past seemed a muddle of memories without sequence, like a confused pile of old photographs. To sort them out he tried recalling his life from the start.
First he had been a child, then a schoolboy, then his mother died. He became a student, tried to work as a painter and became very ill. He hung uselessly round cafés for a time, then took a job in an institute. He got mixed up with a woman there, lost the job, then went to live in a badly governed place where his son was born. The woman and child left him, and for no very clear reason he had been sent on a mission to some sort of assembly. This had been hard at first, then easy, because he was suddenly a famous man with important papers in his briefcase. Women loved him. He had been granted an unexpected holiday with Sandy, then something cold had stung his cheek—
His thoughts recoiled from that point like fingers from a scalding plate, but he forced them back to it and gradually more recent, more depressing memories came to him.
CHAPTER 42.
Catastrophe
There had been a sky dark with onrushing clouds. He had been alone with some scattered rocks, old bones and feathers at his feet and had looked round saying “Sandy?” but there was nobody else on the moor and the light was fading from two or three sunset streaks in the clouds to the west. He had run across the heather screaming Alexander’s name and tripped and fallen into darkness. He had wrestled a while with something entangling, then realized it was a downy quilt, flung it aside and sat up.
He was in bed in a darkened room with a headache and a feeling of terrible loss. He was sure he had come here with people who had been kind to him, but who were they? Where had they gone? His hand found and flicked the switch of a bedlight. The room was a dormitory with a pair of beds to each wall and dressing tables between them loaded with female cosmetics. The walls had coloured posters of male singers on them and notices saying things like JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID DON’T THINK THEY AREN’T PLOTTING AGAINST YOU. His clothes were scattered about the floor. He groaned, rubbed his head, got up and quickly dressed. He felt that something very good had happened recently. It may not have been love, but it had left him ready for love. Delight had opened him, prepared him for someone who wasn’t there. He was anguished by the absence of someone to hold and whisper to affectionately, someone to hold him and speak lovingly back. He left the room and hurried along a dark corridor toward a sound of music and voices behind a door. He pushed the door open and stood blinking in the light. The voices stopped then someone shouted, “Look out! Here he comes again!” and a huge explosion of laughter went up.
The gallery was emptier than he remembered. Most people lay on cushions on the lowest floor and he hurried through them looking left and right. He remembered meeting a thin-lipped smiling little mouth in a glade of dark hair and cried to a laughing mouth among dark hair, “Is it you? Were you with me?”
“When?”
“In the bedroom?”
“Oh, no, not me! Wasn’t it Helga? The woman dancing up there?”
He rushed onto the dance floor, crying, “Are you Helga? Were you with me in the bedroom?”
“Sir,” said Timon Kodac, who was dancing