Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [87]
Nor was it poetry, for poems were too finished and perfect to finish and perfect anything themselves. The key was so simple and obvious that it had been continually overlooked and was less likely to be a specialist’s triumphant conclusion than to be mentioned casually by someone innocent and dull; so he had searched among biographies and autobiographies, correspondences, histories and travel books, in footnotes to outdated medical works and the indexes of Victorian natural histories. Recently he had thought the key more likely to be found on a night walk through the streets, printed on a scrap of paper blown out of the rubble of a bombed factory, or whispered in a dark street by someone leaning suddenly out of a window.
Tonight he came to a piece of waste ground, a hill among tenements that had been suburban twenty years earlier. The black shape of it curved against the lesser blackness of the sky and the yellow spark of a bonfire flickered just under the summit. He left the pallid gaslit street and climbed upward, feeling coarse grass against his shoes and occasional broken bricks. When he reached the fire it had sunk to a few small flames among a heap of charred sticks and rags. He groped on the ground till he found some scraps of cardboard and paper and added them to the fire with a torn-up handful of withered grass. A tall flame shot up and he watched it from outside the brightness it cast. He imagined other people arriving one at a time and standing in a ring round the firelight. When ten or twelve had assembled they would hear a heavy thudding of wings; a black shape would pass overhead and land on the dark hilltop, and the messenger would walk down to them bringing the key. The fire burned out and he turned and looked down on Glasgow. Nothing solid could be seen, only lights—streetlamps like broken necklaces and bracelets of light, neon cinema signs like silver and ruby brooches, the ruby, emerald and amber twinkle of traffic regulators—all glowing like treasure spilled on the blackness.
He went back down to the dingy streets and entered a close in one of the dingiest. The stair was narrow, ill lit and smelling of cat piss. Before a lavatory door on a half landing he stepped over two children who knelt on a rug, playing with a clockwork toy. The top landing had three doors, one with FORBES COULTER on it in Gothic script among gold vine leaves, framed behind glass which the passage of years had blotched with mildew on the inside. The door was opened by a small woman with an angry cloud of curly grey hair. She said plaintively, “Robert’s down in the lavatory Duncan, you’ll just have to come in and wait.”
Thaw stepped across a cupboard-sized lobby into a tidy comfortable crowded room. Wardrobe, sideboard, table and chairs left narrow spaces between them. A tall window had a sink in front and a gas cooker beside it. A shadow was cast over the fireplace by drying clothes on a pulley in the ceiling, and the table held the remains of a meal.
Mrs. Coulter began moving plates to the sink and Thaw sat by the fire and stared into a bed-recess near the door. Coulter’s father lay there, his shoulders supported by pillows, his massive sternly lined blind enduring face turned slightly toward the room.
Thaw said, “Are you any better, Mr. Coulter?”
“In a way, yes, Duncan; but then again, in a way, no. How’s the school doing?”
“I’m all right at art and English.”
“Art is your subject isn’t it? I used to paint a bit myself. During the thirties a few of us—we were unemployed, you know−we got together on Thursday evenings in a room near Brigton Cross and we’d get a teacher or a model along from the art school. We called ourselves the Brigton Socialist Art Club. Have you heard of