Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [63]
Mr. Thaw would enter with a grim look and say, “Duncan! You’ve behaved badly to your mother again. She goes to the bother and expense of making a good dinner and ye won’t eat it. Aren’t ye ashamed of yourself?”
Thaw would hang his head.
“I want you to apologize to her.”
“Don’t know what ’polgize means.”
“Tell her you’re sorry and you’ll eat what you’re given.”
Then Thaw would snarl “No, I won’t!” and be thrashed. During the thrashing he screamed a lot and afterward stamped, yelled, tore his hair and banged his head against the wall until his parents grew frightened and Mr. Thaw shouted, “Stop that or I’ll draw my hand off yer jaw!”
Then Thaw beat his own face with his fists, screaming, “Like this like this like this?”
It was hard to silence him without undoing the justice of the punishment. On the advice of a neighbour they one day undressed the furiously kicking boy, filled a bath with cold water and plunged him in. The sudden chilling scald destroyed all his protest, and this treatment was used on later occasions with equal success. Shivering slightly he would be dried with soft towels before the living-room fire, then put to bed with his doll. Before sleep came he lay stunned and emotionless while his mother tucked him in. Sometimes he considered withholding the goodnight kiss but could never quite manage it.
When he had been punished for not eating a particular food he was not given that food again but a boiled egg instead. Yet after hearing how the former tenants had misused their oven he looked very thoughtfully at the shepherd’s pie when it was brought to table that evening. At length he pointed and said, “Can I have some?”
Mrs. Thaw looked at her husband then took her spoon and plonked a dollop onto Thaw’s plate. He stared at the mushy potato with particles of carrot, cabbage and mince in it and wondered if brains really looked like that. Fearfully he put some in his mouth and churned it with his tongue. It tasted good so he ate what was on the plate and asked for more. When the meal was over his mother said, “There. You like it. Aren’t ye ashamed of kicking up all that din about nothing?”
“Can I go down to the back green?”
“All right, but come when I call you, it’s getting late.” He hurried through the lobby, banged the front door behind him and ran downstairs, the weight of food in his stomach making him feel excited and powerful. In the warm evening sunlight he put his brow to the grass and somersaulted down a green slope till he fell flat from dizziness and lay with the tenements and blue sky spinning and tilting round and round his head. He keeked between the stems of sorrel and daisies at the midden, a three-sided brick shed where bins were kept. The sound of voices came indistinctly through the grass blades to his ears, and the scratchings of a steel-tipped boot on an iron railing, and the rumble of a bin being shifted. He sat up.
Two boys slightly older than himself were bent over the bins and throwing out worn clothes, empty bottles, some pram wheels and a doormat, while a big boy of ten or eleven put them in a sack. One of the smaller boys found a hat with a bird’s wing on it. Mimicking the strut of a proud woman he put it on and said, “Look at me, Boab, am I no’ the big cheese?
The older boy said, “Stop that. You’ll get the auld wife after us.”
He dumped the sack over the railings into the next green and the three of them climbed over to it. Thaw followed by squeezing between the railings then lay down again on the grass. He heard them whisper together and the big boy said, “Never mind about him.”
He realized he was frightening them and followed more boldly into the next green, though keeping a distance. He was slightly appalled when the big boy turned and said, “What d’ye want, ye wee bugger?”
Thaw said, “I’m coming with you.”
His scalp tightened, his heart knocked on his ribs but this boy had never eaten what he had eaten. The boy with the hat said,“Thump him, Boab!”
Boab said, “Why d’ye want tae come with us?”
“Because.”
“Because of what?”