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she is away, racing off into the fog.
The barman comes to fill up my coffee cup again. 'These youngsters,' he says,
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smiling and shaking his head. It would appear I have been declared an honorary
senior citizen (looking in the mirror at the far side of the bar, I can
understand why). I am about to reply when from outside the bar the manic
beeping of a rickshaw-boy's heels makes us both turn to the window. Miss
Arrol's newly hired vehicle reappears, skids and turns round, just outside the
open door of the bar. She sticks her head round the edge, 'Mr Orr,' she calls.
I wave. Her new rickshaw-boy already looks annoyed. The two previous ones, and
the sedan carriers, look slightly incredulous. 'My travels; I'll be in touch,
all right?'
I nod. She seems satisfied, ducks back in and snaps her fingers. The cab leaps
offence more. The barman and I look at each other.
'God must have sneezed when he blew life into that one,' he says. I nod and
sip my coffee, not wishing to talk. He goes to wash some glasses
I study the pale face in the mirror opposite, above serried glasses, beneath
poised bottles. Shall I be hypnotised? I think I am already.
I stay a little longer, recovering. The sedan chair and rickshaw are
man-handled away. The fog, if anything, becomes thicker. I leave the bar and
take elevator, train and elevator home. There is a package waiting for me
there.
Engineer Bouch has returned my hat, along with a note full of assorted
apologies as profuse as they are both unoriginal and ungrammatical; he has
spelt my name 'Or'.
The hat has been expertly cleaned and restored; it smells fresher and looks
newer than when I brought it out of the wardrobe to take to Dissy Pitton's. I
take it outside and throw it from the balcony; it vanishes into the grey mist
on a falling curve, silent and swift, as though on some grand important
mission to the invisible grey waters below.
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Triassic
I don't have to be here you know I could be any damn place I want to.
Here in my mind in my brain in my skull (and that all seems so ob-)
no (no because 'It all seems so obvious now' is a cliche, and I have an
in-built, ingrained, indignant dislike of clichés (and cliques, and clicks).
Aktcherly, the bit about clicks was stretching a point (mathematically
nonsense because if you stretch a point you get a line, in which case it isn't
a goddam point any more, is it?) I mean what the bloody point? Where was I?
(Damn these lights, and tubes, and being turned over, is and getting jabbed;
chap can lose his concentration, dontcherno.
Respool, rewind; back to the beginning it was the mind/brain identity problem.
Ah HA! No problem (phew, glad that's settled) no problem of course they're
exactly the same and totally different; I mean if yer mind isnae in yer fukin
skul wharethefuk is it, eh? Or are you one of these religious idiots?
(Quietly:) No, sir.
Certainly jolly-well not, sir. See this fox hole?
The bit about stretching a point was 100 per cent valid and to the point and
I'm fucking proud of it. I'm sorry I swear so much but I'm under a lot of
pressure at the moment (me am di jam in di sandwich/me am di sand in di
jamwich). I'm not a well man, you know. I can prove it; just let me rewind
here ...
Rushed to hospital; lights overhead. Big white shining lights in sky;
emergency operation; situation critical bla bla bla (fuck that pal, I was
always critical), condition stable (fairynuf, it wiz only recently it all
started to get to me), comfortable (no I am not bloody comfortable; would you
be?). Fast forward again dot dot dot.
- hek gang, look, you don't want to listen to my problems (and I
certainly don't want to listen to yours) so howsa bout I intraduce my fren
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here; old pala mine, fren frum waybak, wontchya ta giv him
Ghost capital
-
steady boy. Like I was saying, me and this guy go waybak, an I wantcher to
give him a real
Ghosts capital. Real city of
-
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OK OK on ye go fur fuksake
... basturt.
Ghost capital. Real city of varied stones, the great grey place of wynds and
winds, old, new and festive by turns, between the river and the hills with its
own stone stump, that frozen flow, that fractured plug of ancient matter which
fascinated him.
He came to stay in Sciennes Road, just liking the name, not knowing the place.
It was handy, both for the university and the Institute, and if he pressed his
face against the window of his cold, high-ceilinged room, he could just see
the edge of the Crags, grey-brown corrugations above the slate roofs and smoke
of the city.
He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom
just being on his own gave him.
He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted,
his own food to buy arid places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious,
sublime.
His home was in the west of the country, in the industrial heartland which was
already failing, silting up with cheap fat, starved of energy, clogging and
clotting and thickening and threatened. There he had lived, mum and dad and
brothers and sisters and him, in a pebble-dashed house on an estate beneath
the low hills, just within sight of the sihoke and steam-bannered chimneys
above the railway workshops where his father worked.
His father kept pigeons in a loft on some waste ground. There were a dozern or
more lofts on the piece of wasteland, all tall and misshapen and unplanned and
made of corrugated iron painted matt black. In the summers, when he went there
to help his father or to look at the softly cooing birds, the loft was very
hot and its befeathered, dropping-spattered spaces seemed like a dark,
rich-scented other world.
He did well at school, though of course they said he could do better. He came
top in History, because he chose to; that was enough. He'd shift up a gear if
and when he had to. Meanwhile he played and read and drew and watched
television.
His father was injured at work and laid up for a year and half; his mother
went to work in the cigarette factory (his sisters and brothers were old
enough to look after the others). His father recovered, more or less the man
he had been - maybe a little more quick to anger - and his mother went
part-time until she was made redundant years later
He liked his dad, until he became a little ashamed of him, as he became a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]