Lanark: a life in 4 books by Alasdair Gray Page B

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