Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [7]
CHAPTER 2.
Dawn and Lodgings
The foyer downstairs was empty apart from the girl at the cash desk. Through the glass doors Lanark saw lamplight reflected in a rain-wet street. Sometimes the wind dunted the doors extra hard and made them swing inward and admit a hissing draught. Rima took a plastic raincoat from her handbag. He helped her put it on and said, “Where do you get your tram?”
“At the cross.”
“Good. So do I.”
Outside they had to struggle against the wind. He took her hand and forced himself to go fast enough to feel he was dragging her. The cross was not far away and the tram stop was near the mouth of a close. Laughing breathlessly they stepped into this and sheltered from the wind. Rima’s hair had unloosed from its clasps and her composed, large-eyed face glanced at him between two falls of moist hair. She combed it back with her fingers, grimacing and saying, “A bother.”
“I like your hair that way.”
They were silent for a while, standing against opposite walls and looking out into the street. At last Lanark cleared his throat.
“That Frankie is a bitch.”
Rima smiled.
He said, “She was very nasty to Toal.”
Rima said, “She was under a strain, you know.”
“Why?”
“She feels the same about Sludden as Nan does. Whenever Sludden and Gay go off together, Nan weeps and Frankie is rude to people. Sludden says it’s because Nan has a negative ego and Frankie a positive one.”
“My God!” said Lanark. “Do all of Sludden’s girlfriends love him?”
“I don’t.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Oh, look! Look!”
“Look at what?”
“Look!”
The cross was a place where several broad streets met and they could see down two of them, though the dark had made it difficult to see far. And now, about a mile away, where the streets reached the crest of a wide shallow hill, each was silhouetted against a pearly paleness. Most of the sky was still black for the paleness did not reach above the tenement roofs, so it seemed that two little days were starting, one at the end of each street. Rima said again, “Look at what?”
“Can’t you see it? Can’t you see that … what’s the word?
There was once a special word for it ….”
Rima looked in the direction of his forefinger and said coldly,
“Are you talking about the light in the sky?”
“Dawn. That’s what it was called. Dawn.”
“Isn’t that a rather sentimental word? It’s fading already.”
The wind had fallen. Lanark stepped onto the pavement and stood leaning forward and staring along each street in turn, as if wanting to jump to the end of one but unable to decide which. Rima’s indifference to his excitement had made him forget her for the moment. She said with slight distaste, “I didn’t know you were keen on that kind of thing,” then, after a pause, “Good, here’s my tram.”
She went past him into the road. An antique-looking almost-empty tramcar came groaning along the track and stopped between Lanark and the view. It would have taken him to his lodgings. Rima boarded it. He took a step to follow her, then hesitated and said, “Look, I’ll see you again, won’t I?”
As the tram started moving Rima waved offhandedly from the platform. He watched her settle in an upstairs seat, hoping she would turn and wave again. She didn’t. He looked along the two streets. The wan watery light was perceptibly fading from the ends of them. He abruptly crossed over to the broadest and started running up the middle of it.
He ran with his gaze on the skyline, having an obscure idea that the day would last longer if he reached it before the light completely faded. The wind rose. Great gusts shoved at his back making it easier to run than walk. This race with the wind toward a fading dawn was the finest thing he had done since coming to that city. When the sky had grown altogether black he stopped, rested up a close mouth to recover his breath, then trudged back to the tramstop at the cross.
The next tram took him along a succession of similar tenement-lined streets. The stop where he got off had tenements on one side and a blank factory wall on