“I own none of it.”
“You own as much of it as anyone! You can own
more
of it if you use your brain and learn to do well in the exams. You have a good brain. Your teachers say so. They want to help you. Why don’t you want to be helped?”
There was no special position for praying in. People sat with legs apart or crossed, arms folded, hands clasped or clenched as they pleased, but all shut their eyes to suggest concentration and bowed their heads as a mark of respect. For a long time Thaw had stopped shutting his eyes but lacked the courage to lift his head. Today, arriving late and breathing uneasily, a great carelessness filled him and he impatiently raised his head during a lengthy prayer. He was seated on one side of the gallery with a clear view down on the bent heads of the congregation, the choir, the minister in the octagonal tower of his pulpit and the headmaster at the foot of it. The minister was a fat-faced man whose head wagged and nodded with every phrase while his raptly shut eyes gave it a blind empty look, like a balloon blown about in a draught. Thaw felt suddenly that he was being watched. Among the rows of bowed heads in the gallery opposite was an erect, slightly clumsy, almost expressionless face which, if it noticed him (and he was not sure it did) did so with a faint sarcastic smile. Something in the face made him feel he knew it. Later that day the stranger was introduced into the class as Robert Coulter, who had been promoted to Whitehill Secondary School from Garngad Junior Secondary School. He fitted into the class easily, making friends without effort and doing fairly well at the things Thaw did badly. He and Thaw exchanged embarrassed nods when accident brought them face to face and otherwise ignored each other. Once, in the science room, the pupils stood talking by their benches before the teacher arrived. Coulter approached Thaw and said, “Hullo.”
“Hullo.”
“How are you getting on?”
“Not too bad. How are you?”
“Ach, not too bad.”
After a pause Coulter said, “Would you mind swopping seats?”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d like a closer view….” Coulter pointed at Kate Caldwell. “After all, you’re not interested in that sort of thing.” Thaw took his books to Coulter’s bench filled with black rage and depression. Nothing could have made him admit his interest in Kate Caldwell.
One day after the exams the teachers sat at their desks correcting papers while the pupils read comics, played chess or cards or talked quietly in groups. Coulter, at a desk in front of Thaw, turned round and said, “What are ye reading?”
Thaw showed a book of critical essays on art and literature. Coulter said accusingly, “You don’t read that for fun.”
“Yes, I read it for fun.”
“People our age don’t read that sort of book for fun. They read it to show they’re superior.”
“But I read this sort of book even when there’s nobody to see me.”
“That shows you arenae trying to make us think you’re superior, you’re trying to make
yourself
think you’re superior.”
Thaw scratched his head and said, “That’s clever, but not very true. What are you reading?”
Coulter showed him a magazine called
Astounding Science Fiction
, with a picture on the cover of tentacled creatures manipulating a piece of machinery in a jungle clearing. Green lightning leaped from the machine into the sky where it split open a planet which seemed to be the earth. Thaw shook his head and said, “I don’t like science fiction much. It’s pessimistic.”
Coulter grinned and said, “That’s what I like about it. I was reading a great story the other day called
Colonel Johnson Does
His Duty
. This American colonel is in a hideout miles underground. He’s one of those in charge of fighting the third world war, which is all done by pressing switches. Everybody above-ground has been killed, of course, and even a lot of the army folk have had their hideouts blasted by special rockets that bore into the ground. Well, this Colonel Johnson, see, has been out of touch for months with the folks on his own side, because if you use the radio these special rockets can work out where your hideout is and come down and blast you. Anyway, 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 formation, their thrumming wings and honking throats blending in one music. Lowering their feet they dropped out of sight behind the trees which screened the boating pond. During the next days he collected spare bits of bread and threw them in the pond on his way to school. One morning he saw something that kept him on the shore longer than usual. Beside the island two swans faced each other in such an intent way that he thought they were going to fight. Spreading their wings they rose from the water almost to the tail, pressed their breasts together, then their brows, then their beaks. Pointing their faces skyward they twined necks, then untwisted and coiled them backward, each reflecting the other like a mirror. Together they made and unmade with their bodies the shapes of Greek lyres and renaissance silverware. Suddenly one of them broke the pattern, slipped adroitly behind the other, mounted her tail and thrust his body up and down it while she plunged across the water in a thresh of wings and waves. As they passed Thaw he saw the male push the female’s head under water with his beak, perhaps to make her more docile. At the end of the loch they separated, straightened necks and sailed indifferently apart. The female, being more dishevelled, was readjusting her feathers when the male, in a remote bay, started probing unenthusiastically for minnows.
Ten minutes later Thaw joined the lines in the playground full of grey depression. In class he looked coldly on the pupils, the teacher, and Kate Caldwell most of all. They were part of a deceptive surface, horrifying this time not because it was weak and could not keep out Hell but because it was transparent and could not hide the underlying filth. That evening he walked with Coulter along the canal bank and told him about the swans. Coulter said, “Have you seen slugs do it?”
“
Slugs?
”
“Aye, slugs. When I was on MacTaggart’s farm in Kinlochrua I came out one morning after some rain and here were all these slugs lying in the grass in couples. I took them apart and put them together again tae see how they did it. They seemed so human. Much more human than your swans.”
Thaw stood still for a moment and then cried aloud, “I wish to God I would never want another human being in my whole life! I wish to God I was …”
He paused. A word from a recent botany lesson entered his head. “… self-fertilizing! Oh, Lord God Maker and Sustainer of Heaven and Hell make me self-fertilizing! If you exist.” Coulter looked at him, slightly awestruck, then said, “You scare me sometimes, Duncan. The things you say arenae altogether sane. It all comes of wanting to be superior to ordinary life.”
CHAPTER 17.
The Key
Mr. Thaw worked as a labourer and then as a wages clerk for a firm building housing estates round the city edge. The Korean war began, the cost of living rose and Mrs. Thaw got a job as a shop assistant in the afternoons. She came to feel very tired and suffered depressions which her doctor thought were caused by the change of life. When the tea things had been cleared away in the evenings she would sew or knit, glancing occasionally at Thaw, who sat frowning at the pages of a textbook and fingering his brow or cheek. His inattention drew comments from her.
“You’re not working.”
“I know.”
“You ought to be working. The exams are coming off soon. You’ve made up your mind not to pass and you won’t.”
“I know.”
“And you could pass if you tried. Your teachers all say you could. And you sit there doing nothing and you’ll make us all ashamed of you.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well, do something! And don’t scratch! You sit there clot-clot-clotting at your face till it’s like a lump of raw meat. Think of your sister Ruth if you won’t think of yourself or me. She’s ashamed enough as it is of a brother who creeps about the school like a hunchback.”
“I can’t help my asthma.”
“No, but if you did the exercises the physiotherapist at the Royal told you to do you could walk about like a human being. You were told to do five-minutes exercise each morning and evening. How often did you do them? Once.”
“Twice.”
“Twice. And why? Why don’t you want to improve yourself?”
“Laziness, I suppose.”
“Hm!”
Thaw pretended once more to study a page of mathematics but found himself brooding on a talk with the head English teacher about the school curriculum. Thaw said much of it was neither interesting in itself nor useful in a practical way. Mr. Meikle had looked thoughtfully across the bent backs and heads of his class and said, “Remember, Duncan, when most people leave school they have to live by work which can’t be liked for its own sake and whose practical application is outside their grasp. Unless they learn to work obediently because they’re told to, and for no other reason, they’ll be unfit for human society.”
Thaw sighed, picked up a textbook and read:
A man and his wife clean their teeth from the same cylindrical tube of toothpaste on alternate days. The interior diameter of the nozzle through which the paste is squeezed is .08 of the interior diameter of the tube, which is 3.4 cms. If the man squeezes out a cylinder of toothpaste 1.82 cms in length each time he uses it, and his wife a cylinder 3.13 cms in length, find the length of the tube to the nearest mm. if it lasts from the 3rd of January to the 8th of March inclusive and the man is the first to use it.
A hysterical rage gripped him. Dropping the book, he clutched at his head and rubbed and scratched and towzled it until his mother shouted “Stop!”
“But this is absurd! This is ludicrous! This is unb-unb-unb-unb-unb-unb”—he choked— “unbearable! I don’t understand it, I can’t learn it, what good will it do me?”
“It’ll get you through your exams! That’s all the good it needs to do! You can forget it when you’ve got your Higher Leaving Certificate!”