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By Root 1457 0

this Colonel Johnson invents a machine that can find out where people are by detecting their thought waves. He starts using the machine on America. No good. Everyone in America’s dead. He tries Europe, Africa, Australia. Everybody’s dead there too. Then he tries Asia and here there’s only one other man left alive in the world, and he’s in a city in Russia. So he gets into this plane and flies to Russia. Everything he passes over is dead—no plants or animals or anything. He lands in this Russian city and gets out. Everything’s wreckage, of course, but he creeps through it till he hears this other man moving inside this building. It’s eight years since he’s seen another human being, he’s going mad with loneliness, see, and he’s been hoping to talk tae another man before he dies. The Russian comes out of the building and Colonel Johnson shoots him.”

“But why?” said Thaw.

“Because he’s been trained tae kill Russians. Don’t you like that story?”

“I think it’s a rotten story.”

“Mibby. But it’s true tae life. What do you do after school?”

“I go to the library, or mibby a walk.”

“I go intae town with Murdoch Muir and big Sam Lang. We stage riots.”

“How?”

“D’ye know the West End Park?”

“The park near the Art Galleries?”

“Aye. Well, they don’t lock it up at night like other parks and folk can walk through it. There’s a few lights in it but no’ many. Well, big Sam’ll stand near some bushes and light a fag, and when someone comes we charge out from the bushes and pretend to kick big Sam in the guts and he lashes out with his fists and we all fall down and roll about swearing. We don’t touch each other, but in the dark it’s hellish convincing. You get lassies running away screaming for the police.”

“Don’t the police come?”

“We run away before they come. Murdoch Muir’s dad is a policeman. When we tell him about it he roars and laughs and tells us whit he would dae tae us if he caught us.” Thaw said, “That’s anti-social.”

“Mibby, but it’s natural. More natural than going walks by yourself. Come on, admit you’d like tae come with us one night.”

“But I wouldnae.”

“Admit you’d sooner look at that comic than read your art criticism.”

Coulter pointed at the cover of a neighbour’s comic. It showed a blonde in a bathing costume being entwined by a huge serpent. Thaw opened his mouth to deny this, then frowned and shut it. Coulter said, “Come on, that picture makes your cock prick, doesn’t it? Admit you’re like the rest of us.” Thaw went to the next classroom alarmed and confused. “That picture makes your cock prick. Admit you’re like the rest of us.” He remembered other words heard long before but carefully ignored: “I wouldnae mind feeling her belly in a dark room.”

He had known from the age of four that babies hatched from their mothers’ stomachs. Mr. Thaw had described the growth of the embryo in detail, and Thaw had assumed this process occurred spontaneously in most women above a certain age. He accepted this as he accepted his father’s account of the origin of species and the solar system: it was an interesting, mechanical, not very mysterious business which men could know about but not influence. Nothing he heard or read later had mentioned inevitable links between love, sex and birth, so he never thought there were any. Sex was something he had discovered squatting on the bedroom floor. It was so disgusting that it had to be indulged secretly and not mentioned to others. It fed on dreams of cruelty, had its climax in a jet of jelly and left him feeling weak and lonely. It had nothing to do with love. Love was what he felt for Kate Caldwell, a wish to be near her and do things that would make her admire him. He hid this love because public knowledge of it would put him in an inferior position with other people and with Kate herself. He was ashamed of it, but not disgusted. And now, jerkily, under the influence of Coulter’s remark, his separate pictures of love, sex and birth started to become one.

He was crossing the hill in the park when he heard musical throbbing come from the sky. Five swans flew over his head in V