Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [95]
The minister looked puzzled.
“Why did God make cuckoos so that they have to live by killing thrushes? Did they give the world to the Devil too? Or did the thrushes?”
The minister got up and said, “The life of brute beasts, Duncan, is so different from ours that strong feelings for them are bound to be vanity and self-deception. Even your father the atheist would agree with me in that. I understand you will be here a week or two. Mibby we can discuss these matters another time. Meanwhile, I hope you have better health.”
“Thank you,” said Thaw. He pretended to scribble on a piece of paper till the minister had gone then folded his arms on the edge of the table and laid his head on them. He was very tired but if he lost consciousness for a moment the beast of suffocation might pounce on his chest, so he tried to rest without actually sleeping. This was difficult. He got up, collected his things and went slowly to bed.
That afternoon his memory of what is was like to be well faded and hope of improvement faded with it. The only imaginable future was a repetition of a present which had shrunk to a tiny painful act, a painful breath drawn again and again from an ocean of breath. No longer companioning erotic fancies (which, like the pills, had got useless through overuse) the sluggish resolute life of the garden grated on him as it grated on the soil feeding it. He felt the natural world stretching out from each wall of the hotel in great tracts of lumpy earth and rock coated thickly with life, a stuff whose parts renewed themselves by eating each other. Two or three hundred miles to the south was a groove in the earth with a gathering of stone and metal in it−Glasgow. In Glasgow he had been aided a little by a feeling that among many people someone might hear and help if he screamed loudly enough. But among these mountains screaming was useless; his pain was as irrelevant as the pain of the thrush starved out by the cuckoo, the snail crushed by the thrush. He started screaming but stopped at once. He tried to think but his thoughts were trapped by the minister’s speech. How could the world be justified except as punishment? Punishment for what?
That evening Miss Maclaglan phoned for a doctor. He entered Thaw’s room and sat by the bed, a not quite middle-aged man in plus fours with a black moustache and squarish head sunk so far into his shoulders that he seemed unable to move it independently of his body. He took Thaw’s pulse and temperature, asked how long he had been like this and grunted sombrely. Miss Maclaglan brought a pan of boiling water with a small metal cage clipped inside it. He took glass and metal parts from the cage, fitted them together into a hypodermic syringe, filled this from a rubber-capped bottle then asked Thaw to pull up his pyjama sleeve. Thaw stared at a corner of the ceiling, trying to think of nothing but a crack in it. He felt the muscle of his upper arm wiped with something cold and then the needle running in. The steel point breaking through layers of tissue set his teeth on edge. There was a faint ache as the muscle swelled with pumped-in fluid, then the needle was withdrawn and an amazing thing started to happen. There spread through his body from the arm, but this time unsustained by thought, the tingling liberating flood he had only been able to make erotically. Each nerve, muscle, joint and limb relaxed, his lungs expanded with sufficient air, he sneezed twice and lay back feeling altogether comfortable and well. There was no sense of asthma waiting to return. He could not believe he would ever be unwell again. He looked out into the sun-warm garden. An overgrown rosebush beside the pond had put out white blossoms, and the black dot of a bee moved over one. Surely the bee was enjoying itself? Surely the bush grew because it liked to grow? Everything in the garden seemed to have grown to its appropriate height and now rested a moment, preserved in the amber light of the evening sun. The garden looked healthy. Thaw turned with servile gratitude to the ordinary