Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [97]
Suddenly he was sitting up and laughing in the darkness. He had been thinking about the key, or perhaps dreaming of it, and now he saw the universe and the meaning of things. It was hard to put his vision into words but he wanted to share it. “Everything is hate,” he gabbled dreamily. “We are all hate, big balloons of hate. Tied together by Ruth’s hair ribbons.”
The two women screamed. Mrs. Thaw said in a high-pitched voice, “That settles it. We’re going back. We’re going back tomorrow. There must be somebody who knows how to cure him.”
Ruth yelled, “You’re selfish, utterly selfish! You just don’t care about anyone but yourself!” and started crying. Thaw felt puzzled, knowing the words had not conveyed what he meant to convey. He tried again.
“Men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate. I seem to be buried in this rockery …” for though he could dimly see the bedroom, and knew where his mother and sister lay, he also felt buried up to the armpits in a heap of earth and rocks. Mrs. Thaw shouted, “Shut up! Shut up!”
Next morning Thaw and his mother returned to Glasgow. Ruth was allowed to stay behind. That day a boat called at Kinlochrua and Miss Maclaglan drove them to the pier and waved from it as they put to sea. The sun shone as bright as when he had arrived five days before, and for the first time since arriving he saw the great green side of Ben Rua. A clean hard wind was blowing. A member of the crew, a thin boy of Thaw’s age, leaned against the funnel playing a concertina. Gulls with spread wings hung above in the rushing air. Thaw sat on a ventilator which stuck out of the deck like an aluminium toadstool, and nearby his mother waved to the figure on the receding pier. On the mountaintop he could make out the white dot of the triangulation point. He thought of the previous night and tried to recover from the muddle of darkness and crying his vision of the key. He seemed to have thought that, just as hydrogen was the basic stuff of the universe, so hatred was the basic material of the mind. In the fresh sunlight it was not a convincing idea. He felt amazingly weak, yet liberated, and while sitting still was not conscious of asthma at all.
Two days later Thaw walked jauntily into town with Coulter to visit the Art Galleries. He talked about the visit to Kinlochrua and what the doctor said. Coulter became angry. “That’s daft!” he said. “Everybody masturbates at our age. It’s natural. We produce the stuff; how else can we get rid of it? Five times a week sounds about normal to me.”
“But that doctor said that in lunatic asylums they do it all the time.”
“I believe him. Lunatics are like us. They arenae allowed to have sex in other ways. And what else can they do with their time?”
“But whenever I do it nowadays I have another attack.”
“I can believe it. That doctor made you think you would have asthma when you masturbate so you have asthma. Anybody can make you believe anything if they try hard enough. I remember once making you think I was a German spy.”
Thaw started grinning. “The funny thing is,” he said, “that doctor had me believing in God as well.”
“How? No, don’t tell me, I see how,” said Coulter with disgust,
“I bet you felt very special and superior, being punished by God for something he doesnae give a damn for in other folk. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but ye may as well leave God and masturbation out of it and go back to having asthma in the normal way.”
CHAPTER 19.
Mrs. Thaw Disappears
Thaw opened his diary and wrote:
“Love seeketh not itself to please Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” So sung a little Clod of Clay trodden by the cattle’s feet, but a Pebble of the brook warbled out these metres meet. a “Love seeketh only Self to please, to bind another to Its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, and builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
Blake doesn’t choose,