Read Online Lanark: a life in 4 books by Alasdair Gray - Free Book Online

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.

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