Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [58]
Later I sat on a swivel chair above fathoms of emptiness, grey emptiness all around except where, six feet to the right, a pencil moving on its point across an angled notepad showed where my secretary was taking down the words I dictated to her. My right hand felt as if it rested on my knee, but I could see nothing but the dial of the wristwatch. At half-past five a line of carpet-coloured stepping stones appeared which released me from the chair, but walking on them was hard for I could no longer see my feet, and when I reached the end, instead of the linoleum-coloured stepping stones of the lift floor I saw nothing: the emptiness before and behind was total and complete. I saw nothing, heard nothing and felt nothing but the soles of my feet pressing the floor under them. Suddenly I was too tired and angry to continue. I stepped forward and nothing happened, except that the pressure on my feet vanished. I neither fell nor floated. I had become bodiless in a bodiless world. I existed as a series of thoughts amidst infinite greyness.
At first I was greatly relieved. I have never been afraid of loneliness, and the previous days had been more of a strain than I had let myself believe. I slept almost at once, which means that I stopped thinking and the surrounding greyness went black. After a while it grew light again and for the first time in my life I was idle. Every life has blank moments when we stand waiting for a bus or a friend and there’s nothing to do but think. In the past I had filled these moments by calculating how an unexpected war or election would affect the wealth entrusted to me, but I had no zest for calculation now. Money, even imaginary money, needs the future to give it force. Without future it is not even ink in a ledger, paper in a purse. The future had gone with my body. There was nothing to do but remember, and I was depressed to find that the work which had given my life a goal and a decent order now looked like an arithmetical brain disease, a profit-and-loss calculation lasting years and proving nothing. My memory was a catalogue of things I had ignored and devalued. I had enjoyed no definite friendship or love, no intense hatred or desire; my life had been stony soil in which only numbers grew, and now I could do nothing but sift the stones and hope one or two would turn out to be jewels. I was the loneliest and most impotent man in the world. I was about to turn desperate when a lovely thing appeared in the air before me.
It was a cream-coloured wall patterned with brownish-pink roses. A beam of early morning summer sunlight shone on it and on me. I was sitting in bed with the wall on one side and two chairs on the other. It seemed a very big bed, though it was an ordinary single one, and two chairs had been placed to stop my falling out. My legs were covered by a quilt on which lay a tobacco pipe with a broken stem, a small slipper and a book with bright cloth pages. I was perfectly happy and singing a song on one note: oolooloolooloo. When tired of that I sang dadadadada for I had discovered the difference between loo and da and was interested in it. Later still, having tired of singing, I took the slipper and thumped the wall until my mother came. Each morning she lay in bed with a thin solemn young man on the other side of the roses. Her warmth reached me through the wall so I was never cold or lonely. I don’t suppose my mother was unnaturally tall but she seemed twice the size of anyone else, and brown-haired, and regally slender above the hips. Below the hips she changed a lot, being often pregnant. I remember seeing her upper body rising behind the curve of her stomach like a giantess half-hidden by the horizon of a calm sea. I remember sitting