“So I see.”
“Provost Dodd was looking for you.”
“Who’s Provost Dodd?”
The question seemed meant to stop conversation rather than aid it. He walked beside her, thinking of what he had seen of her friends in the bedroom. This memory no longer horrified. It combined with his words to the blond girl, with Gloopy’s disappearance and with the fog; it cast around her an odour of exciting malign sexual possibility. He asked abruptly, “Did you enjoy the party?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“If you must know I spent most of the time in the bathroom with Gay. She was very sick.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you want to talk to me at all?”
“No.”
His heart and penis hardened in angry amazement. He gripped her arms and pulled her round to face him saying softly, “Why?” She glared into his eyes and yelled, “Because I’m afraid of you!”
He was hit by a feeling of shame and weariness. He let her go, shrugging his shoulders and muttering, “Well, maybe that’s wise of you.”
Half a minute later he was surprised to find her walking beside him. She said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Maybe I am a dangerous man.”
She began laughing but quickly smothered this and slipped a hand through his arm. The light pressure made him calmer and stronger.
They came to a street corner. The fog was very thick. A tramcar clanged past a few feet in front of them, but nothing could be seen of it. Rima said, “Where’s your coat? You’re shivering.”
“So are you. I’d take you for a coffee but I don’t know where we are.”
“You’d better come with me. I live nearby and I stole a bottle of brandy from the party.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
Rima withdrew her hand sharply and said, “You, are a very, big, wet, drip!”
Lanark was stung by this. He said, “Rima, I am not clever or imaginative. I have only a few rules to live by. These rules may annoy folk who are clever enough to live without them, but I can’t help that and you ought not to blame me.”
“All right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You can make me apologize by breathing on me, it seems.”
They turned the corner. Lanark said, “But I can frighten you too.”
She was silent.
“And I can make you laugh.”
She laughed slightly and took his arm again.
They seemed to enter a lane between low buildings like private garages. Rima unlocked a door, led him up a steep narrow wooden stair and switched a light on. Her austere manner and clothing had made Lanark expect a stark room. This room was small, with a sloping ceiling and not much furniture, but there were many sad little personal touches. Childish crayon sketches of unconvincing green fields and blue seas were fixed to the walls. There was the only clock Lanark remembered seeing, carved and painted like a log cabin, with a pendulum below and a gilt weight shaped like a fir cone. The hands were missing. A stringless guitar lay on a chest of drawers and a teddy bear sat on the bed, which was a mattress on the floor against the wall. Rima clicked the switch of the electric radiator, removed her coat and became busy with a kettle and gas ring in a cupboard-sized scullery. There were no chairs, so Lanark sat on the floor and leaned on the bed. The radiator heated the small place so quickly that he was soon able to remove his fog-sodden jacket and jersey, yet though his skin was warm he was still shaken from inside by spasms of shivering. Rima carried in two large mugs of black coffee. She sat on the bed with her legs folded under her and handed a mug to Lanark saying, “You probably won’t refuse to drink it.”
The coffee flavour was drowned by the taste of sugar and brandy.
Later Lanark lay back on the bed, feeling comfortable and slightly drunk. Rima, her eyes closed, rested her shoulders against the wall and cradled the teddy bear in her lap. Lanark said, “You’ve been kind to me.”
She stroked the old toy’s head. Lanark tried to think of other words. He said, “Did you come to this town long ago?”
“What does ‘long’ mean?”
“Were you very small when you came?”
She shrugged.
“Do you remember a time when days were long and bright?” Tears slid from under her closed lids. He touched her shoulders.
“Let me undress you?”
She allowed this. As he unfastened her brassière his hands met a familiar roughness.
“You’ve got dragonhide! Your shoulderblades are covered!”
“Does that excite you?”
“I have it too!”
She cried out harshly, “Do you think that makes a bond between us?”
He shook his head urgently and placed a finger on her lips, feeling that words would move them farther apart. His anxiety to be tender to someone who needed and rejected tenderness made his caresses clumsy, until genital eagerness sucked thought out of him.
He felt relieved afterward and would have liked to sleep. He heard her rise briskly from his side and start dressing. She said curtly, “Well? Was it fun?”
He tried to think then said defiantly, “Yes. Great fun.”
“How nice for you.”
A nightmare feeling began to rise around him. He heard her say, “You’re not good at sex, are you? I suppose Sludden is the best I’ll ever get.”
“You told me that you didn’t …. love …. Sludden.”
“I don’t, but I use him sometimes. Just as he uses me. He and I are very cold people.”
“Why did you let me come here?”
“You wanted so much to be warm that I thought perhaps you were. You’re as cold as the rest of us, really, and even more worried about it. I suppose that makes you clumsy.” He was drowned in nightmare now, lying on the bottom of it as on an ocean bed, yet he could breathe. He said, “You’re trying to kill me.”
“Yes, but I won’t manage. You’re
terribly
solid.”
She finished dressing and slapped his cheek briskly saying, “Come on. I can’t apologize to you again. Get up and get dressed.”
She stood with her back against the chest of drawers, watching while he slowly dressed, and when he finished she said inexorably, “Goodbye, Lanark.”
All his feelings were numbed but he stood a moment, staring stupidly at her feet. She said, “Goodbye, Lanark!” and gripped his arm and led him to the door, and pushed him out and slammed it.
He groped his way downstairs. Near the bottom he heard her open the door and shout “Lanark!” He looked back. Something dark and whirling came down on his head, heavily enfolding it, and again the door slammed. He dragged the thing off and found it was a sheepskin jacket with the fleece turned inward. He hung this on the inside knob of the bottom door and stepped into the lane and walked away.
After a time the dense freezing fog and his arctic brain and body blended. He moved along streets in them, a numb kernel of soul kept going by feet somewhere underneath. The only thing he felt very conscious of was his itching right arm, and several times he stopped and rubbed it backward and forward against corners of walls to scratch it through the sleeve. The sounds and lights of tramcars passed him frequently now, and after crossing a street he was puzzled by a complicated shape between himself and the flow of a high lamp. Going nearer he discerned a queen with a long train riding side-saddle on a rearing horse. It was a statue in the great square. He considered going for warmth to the security office but decided he needed something to drink. He crossed other streets till he saw red neon shining above the pavement. He opened the tinkling door of a small aromatic tobacconist shop, crossed to a staircase and went down into Galloway’s Tearoom. This was a low-ceilinged place much bigger than the shop upstairs. Most of it was alcoves, some opening from others, each with a sofa, table and chairs in it and a stag’s head on a plaque. Lanark ordered lemon tea, sat in the corner of a sofa and fell asleep.
He awoke long afterward. The glass of tea was cold on the table before him and he was listening to a conversation between two businessmen. His ear was an inch from a thick brown curtain separating his sofa from where they sat and clearly they had no sense of being overheard.
“… Dodd is on our side. After all, the Corporation has nothing to do but light the streets and keep the trams running, and these services don’t pay for themselves. They have to be subsidized by the sale of municipal property, so Dodd is selling and I’m buying.”
“But what will you do with it?”
“Sublet. The smallest of these rooms could contain sixteen single apartments if we divided them up with matchboard partitions. I’ve measured.”
“Don’t be mad! Why should anyone want a tiny apartment just because it’s on the square? There’s no profit in being a landlord with a third of the city standing empty.”
“No profit at the moment. I mean to sublet these eventually.”
“Don’t be mysterious, Aitcheson. You can trust me.”
“All right. You know the population is smaller than it used to be. Have you faced the fact that it gets smaller all the time?”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
There was a silence. “What about the new arrivals?”
“Not enough of them. You live in a hotel, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Of course. So do I. Nobody notices disappearances in a hotel. In the normal way you expect the man in the next room to disappear after a while. Life is different in a tenement. Suddenly the house across the landing is empty. A little later the one upstairs goes empty too. Then you notice there are no lights in half the windows across the street. It’s disturbing! Mind you, people are still pretending not to notice. Wait till they have no neighbours left. Wait till they’re lonely and the panic starts! They’ll crowd to the city centre like drowning men onto a raft. If the city chambers are still empty they’ll break in and squat. But they won’t be empty because I’ll be subletting them.”
After a pause, the other voice said grudgingly, “Very clever. But aren’t you being a bit optimistic? You’re gambling on a trend that may not continue.”
“What is there to stop it?”
Lanark stood up, feeling terribly afraid. A short while ago he had told Sludden he was content. Now everything he heard or saw or remembered was pushing him toward panic. He desperately wanted Rima beside him, a Rima who would smile and be sad with him, a Rima whose fears he could soothe and who would not fling words at him like stones. He paid for the tea and went back to his own room and undressed. When jacket and jersey were removed he saw the right shirtsleeve was stiff with dried blood, and on taking off the shirt he found the arm was dragonhide from shoulder to wrist, with spots of it on the back of his hand. He put on his pyjamas, got into bed and fell asleep. There seemed nothing else to do.
CHAPTER 6.
Mouths
With no will to see anyone or do anything he immersed himself in sleep as much as possible, only waking to stare at the wall until sleep returned. It was a sullen pleasure to remember that the disease spread fastest in sleep. Let it spread! he thought. What else can I cultivate? But when the dragonhide had covered the arm and hand it spread no further, though the length of the limb as a whole increased by six inches. The fingers grew stouter, with a slight web between them, and the nails got longer and more curving. A red point like a rose-thorn formed on each knuckle. A similar point, an inch and a half long, grew on the elbow and kept catching the sheets, so he slept with his right arm hanging outside the cover onto the floor. This was no hardship as there was no feeling in it, though it did all he wanted with perfect promptness and sometimes obeyed wishes before he consciously formed them. He would find it holding a glass of water to his lips and only then notice he was thirsty, and on three occasions it hammered the floor until he waked up and Mrs. Fleck came running with a cup of tea. He felt embarrassed and told her to ignore it. She said, “No, no, Lanark, my husband had that before he disappeared.
You must never ignore it.”
He thanked her. She rubbed her hands on her apron as if drying them and said abruptly, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you get up, Lanark, and look for work? I’ve lost a husband by that”—she nodded to the arm—“and a couple of lodgers, and all of them, before the end, just lay in bed, and all of them were decent quiet fellows like yourself.”
“Why should I get up?”
“I don’t like talking about it, but I’ve an illness of my own—not what you have, a different one—and it’s never spread very far because I’ve had work to do. First it was a husband, then lodgers, now it’s these bloody weans. I’m sure if you get up and work your arm will improve.”
“What work can I get?”
“The Forge over the road is wanting men.”
Lanark laughed harshly and said, “You want me to make components for the Q39.”
“I know nothing about factory work, but if a man gets pay and exercise by it I don’t see why he should complain.”
“How can I go for work with an arm like this?”
“I’ll tell you how. My husband had the same trouble on exactly the same arm. So I knitted him a thick woollen glove and lined it with wash leather. He never used it. But if you wear it along with your jacket nobody will notice, and if they do, why bother? There are plenty of men with crabby hands.”
Lanark said, “I’ll think about it.”
He was prevented from saying more by the hand’s raising the teacup to his lips and holding it there.
Sometimes the children played on the floor of the room. He liked this. They were quarrelsome but they never explained what life was or persuaded him to do something, their selfishness did not make him feel wicked. At these times he felt ashamed of his great arm and kept it below the covers, but once he awoke to find it lying outside with the children squatting round it staring. The boy said admiringly, “You could murder someone with that.”
Lanark was ashamed because the thought had occurred to himself. He drew the arm out of sight and muttered without much conviction that two human hands would be better. The boy said, “Yes, but not in a fight.”
Lanark found the limb beginning to fascinate him. The colour was not really black but an intensely dark green. It looked diseased because it grew on a man, but considered by itself the glossy cold hide, the thorny red knuckles and elbow, the curving steel-blade claws looked very healthy indeed. He began to have fantasies about the damage it could do. He imagined entering the Elite and walking across to the Sludden clique with the hand inside the bosom of his jacket. He would smile at them with one side of his mouth, then expose the hand suddenly. As Sludden, Toal and McPake leapt to their feet he would knock them down with a sweeping sideways blow, then drive the squealing girls into a corner and rake the clothes off them. Then the image grew confused, for each of his fantasies tended to dissolve into another one before reaching a climax. After these dreams he would become dismally cold and depressed. Once he discovered himself stroking the cold right hand with the fingertips of the left and murmuring, “When I am all like this ….” But if he was all like that he would have no feeling at all, so he thought of Rima and her moments of kindness: the time in the truck when she touched him and said she was sorry, the dance and how they held each other, the moment in the fog when she laughed at him and slid her hand round his arm, the coffee she had made and even the jacket she had flung. But these memories were too feeble to restore human feeling, and he would return to admiring the feelingless strength of the dragonish limb until he fell asleep.