Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [27]
After a while nothing seemed very important. Hands were touching his sides, softly sponging and softly drying. The light was too strong to let him open his eyes. Some words were whispered and someone softly laughed. At last he opened his eyelids the narrowest possible slit. He lay naked on a bed with a clean towel across his genitals. Two girls in white dresses stood at his feet, clipping the toenails with tiny silvery scissors. Between their bowed heads he saw the dial of a clock on the wall beyond, a large white dial with a slender scarlet second hand travelling round it. He glanced toward his right side. Growing down from the shoulder was a decent, commonplace, human limb.
CHAPTER 7.
The Institute
The food was always a lax white meat like fish, or a stronger one like breast of chicken, or pale yellow like steamed egg. It was completely tasteless, but though Lanark never ate more than half the small portion on his plate the meals left him unusually comfortable and alert. The room had milk-coloured walls and a floor of polished wood. Five beds with blue coverlets stood against one wall, and Lanark, in the middle bed, faced a wall pierced by five arches. He could see a corridor behind them with a big window covered by a white Venetian blind. The clock was over the middle arch, its circumference divided into twenty-five hours. At half past five the light went on and two nurses carried in hot water and shaving things and made the bed. At six, twelve and eighteen o’clock they brought meals in a wheeled cabinet. At nine, fifteen and twenty-two o’clock a cup of tea was given him by a nurse who measured his temperature and felt his pulse in a slightly offhand manner. At half past twenty-two the neon tubes in the ceiling faded and the only light filtered in through the corridor blind. This was a pearly mobile light from several sources, all moving and growing or dimming as they moved, yet the movement was too stately and suggestive of distances to be cast by traffic. Lanark was soothed by it. Each pillar between the arches threw several shadows into the room, every one a different degree of greyness and all sweeping at different slow rates in one direction or another. The dim, rhythmical, yet irregular movement of these shadows was reassuringly different from the horrifying black pressure which the pressure of the pillow on his cheek still brought to mind. One morning he said to the nurses making the bed, “What’s outside the window?”
“Just scenery. Miles and miles of scenery.”
“Why are the blinds never raised?”
“You couldn’t stand the view, Bushybrows. We can’t stand it and we’re perfectly fit.”
They had begun calling him Bushybrows. He examined his face in two square inches of shaving mirror and noticed that his eyebrows had white hairs in them. He lay back thoughtfully and asked, “How old do I look?”
One said, “A bit over thirty.”
The other said, “No chicken, anyway.”
He nodded glumly and said, “A short while ago I seemed ten years younger.”
“Well, Bushybrows, that’s life, isn’t it?”
He was visited that morning by a bald professional man wearing a white coat and half-moon-shaped rimless glasses. He stood by the bed surveying Lanark with a grave look which did not completely hide amusement. He said, “Do you remember me?”
“No.”
The doctor fingered a piece of sticking plaster on his chin and said, “Three days ago you punched me, just here. Oh yes, you came out fighting. I’m sorry I haven’t