The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray Page B

schemes. As chairman I letthe others do most of the talking, usually sitting with closed eyes and even dozing a little until silence fell. Then I would sit up, summarise the situation in a few crisp words, indicate the only sensible choices, hold a vote on them, then ask the secretary to announce the next item on our agenda. One afternoon, halfway through a meeting, I sensed that my left arm was in a very interesting state. I excused myself, went to lavatory, sat on pan, rolled up shirtsleeve. A big expanse of skin inside the elbow joint had withered into dry white paperiness, paperiness so brittle that it had cracked into little four-sided lozenges like an area of neatly laid marquetry. And it was NOT ALIVE. My first impulse was to set fingernails of my right hand in line and use them to rake that dead paper off with two or three sweeping strokes. It would have left an area of raw underskin with bleeding gashes in it and many wee triangular paper scraps standing up and not easy to nip off. So with the tweezers I delicately prized off each paper tile and placed it between the pages of my pocket book, leaving a raw but undamaged area on which I spread an ointment prescribed by the specialist – Betnovate orTrimovate or Eumovate, I forget which. Then I rolled down sleeve, washed hands, returned to meeting. While performing that delicate operation I was perfectly happy.
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    â€œWell, gents, what have you been discussing?” I said, having been absent for ten or twenty minutes. Only the secretary looked straight at me. The rest seemed too embarrassed to look at anything but the table before them, then they looked furtively at the works supervisor. He was the youngest, the one I most liked and trusted because I had promoted him from being a site foreman. He cleared his throat then explained that, though he did not wholly agree with the rest of the board, there was a general feeling that I should leave the firm’s steering wheel and become more of a back-seat driver; my great experience would always be valuable but blah blah blah blah et cetera . I grinned as I heard all this and when he fell silent was about to quell the mutiny – could easily have done it – but was suddenly overtaken by weariness with the whole business. It occurred to me also that someone had sampled the clear liquid in the tumbler beside my notepad and found it was notwater but Polish vodka. I sipped from it, shrugged and said, “Have it your own way gents.”
    All but the works supervisor at once cheered up, congratulated me on my wise decision, said I would gain rather than lose financially because blah blah blah blah blah. So the paperish arm left me with nothing to enjoy but my skin game.
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    The nature of other crusts ( Lace, Fish-scale, Snakeskin, Shell, Biscuit, Straw and Pads ) I leave to the imagination of my readers, but some cannot be classified by a simple name. From the shallow valley above the caudal vertebrae I have removed three discs of the same size but different textures: beewing, parchment and paper, joined at a point where they overlapped by a little dark purple oval cake. I have also detached something like a tiny withered leaf, intricately mottled with black and grey, glossily smooth on the underside but with a knap like Lilliputian velvet on the upper. Anything often thought about enters our dreams and I sometimes dream of more extravagant growths. One is like a thin slab of soft, colourless cheese, slightly wrinkled: itpeels off with no physical sensation at all. Another lies under it and another under that. At last I uncover what I know is the lowest layer which I fear to remove, knowing that underneath lies nothing but bone wrapped in a network of naked veins, arteries, tendons and nerves, yet intense curiosity is driving me to expose what I dread to see when I fortunately awaken.
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    I reduced the bouts of wild scratching to once a week and between them carefully removed the crusts