Read Online Lanark by Alasdair Gray - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    At last he wakened in pain which