Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [62]
“What’s ga … gavty?”
“Grrrrrravity is what keeps us on the earth. Without it we would fly up into the air.”
“And then we would reach the sky?”
“No. No. The sky is just the space above our heads. Without gravity we would fly up into it forever.”
“But wouldn’t we come to a … a thing on the other side?”
“There is no other side, Duncan. None at all.”
Thaw leaned over his drawing and drew a blue crayon along the line of the sky, pressing hard. He dreamed that night of flying up through empty air till he reached a flat blue cardboard sky. He rested against it like a balloon against a ceiling until worried by the thought of what was on the other side; then he broke a hole and rose through more empty air till he grew afraid of floating forever. Then he came to another cardboard sky and rested there till worried by the thought of the other side. And so on.
Thaw lived in the middle storey of a corporation tenement that was red sandstone in front and brick behind. The tenement backs enclosed a grassy area divided into greens by spiked railings, and each green had a midden. Gangs of midden-rakers from Blackhill crossed the canal to steal from the middens. He was told that Blackhill people were Catholics with beasts in their hair. One day two men came to the back greens with a machine that squirted blue flame and clouds of sparks. They cut the spikes from the railings with the flame, put them in a bag and took them away to use in the war. Mrs. Gilchrist downstairs said angrily, “Now even the youngest of these Blackhill kids will be able to rake our middens.” Other workmen build air-raid shelters in the back greens and a very big one in the school playground, and if Thaw heard the air-raid warning on the way to school he must run to the nearest shelter. Going up to school by the steep back lane one morning he heard the siren wailing in the blue sky. He was almost at school but turned and ran home to where his mother waited in the back-green shelter with the neighbours. At night dark green blinds were pulled down over the windows. Then Mr. Thaw put on an armband and steel hat and went into the street to search for houses showing illegal chinks of light.
Someone told Mrs. Thaw that the former tenants of her flat had killed themselves by putting their heads in the oven and turning the gas on. She wrote at once to the corporation asking that her gas cooker be changed for an electric one, but as Mr. Thaw would still need food when he returned from work she baked him a shepherd’s pie, but with her lips more tightly pursed than usual.
Her son always refused shepherd’s pie or any other food whose appearance disgusted him: spongy white tripe, soft penis-like sausages, stuffed sheep’s hearts with their valves and little arteries. When one of these came before him he poked it uncertainly with his fork and said, “I don’t want it.”
“Why not?”
“It looks queer.”
“But you havnae tasted it! Taste just a wee bit. For my sake.”
“No.”
“Children in China are starving for food like that.”
“Send it to them.”
After more discussion his mother would say in a high-pitched voice, “You’ll sit at this table till you eat every bit” or “Just you wait till I tell your father about this, my dear.” Then he would put a piece of food in his mouth, gulp without tasting and vomit it back onto the plate. After that he would be shut in the back bedroom. Sometimes his mother came to the door and said, “Will you not eat just a wee bit of it? For my sake?” then Thaw, feeling cruel, shouted “No!” and went to the window and looked down into the back green. He would see friends playing there, or the midden-rakers, or neighbours hanging out washing, and feel so lonely and magnificent that he considered opening the window and jumping out. It was a bitter glee to imagine his corpse thudding to the ground among them. At last, with terror, he would hear his father coming clomp-clomp upstairs, carrying his bicycle. Usually Thaw ran to meet him. Now he heard his mother open the door, the mutter of voices in conspiracy, then footsteps coming to the bedroom and his mother