Alasdair Gray - Ten Tales Tall and True

I pointed out that spoken sounds, though perhaps unable to open a closed mind, were as physical a force as dawn sunbeams that open the petals of daisies. But he so gloried in the faith he needed to face his appalling universe that he muttered, “Solipsist!” and turned his back on me. The Americans did not, or not at first. I expect they used me in propaganda for their space programme, or space race, or whatever the advertisers called it before the Russians made it pointless by stopping pretending to compete.

Having solved the universal problems I now need to exercise my brain with smaller matters like time travel, and where Zoë has been for the last two or three days, and Between Two Toes, or The Case of the Mysterious Pellet.

I cannot now say if I am solving the last of these problems in the present or remembering how I once solved it in the past but the time came (or has come) when I made (or will make) a list of items brought recently into my room from the world outside: food, cleaned clothes and towels, newspapers and letters. Then I made (or will make) another list of items on the floor of the room, items my foot could have pattered across: the linoleum, a fringed rug and things often dropped on these like food, clothes, towels, newspapers and letters. Items common to both lists should then be considered one at a time with great care, for one of these must be item X. And I have just remembered that letters and newspapers should be on neither list. Nobody has written to me for years, and I stopped taking papers during the last great miners’ strike in the 1980s when I saw that Britain had again become a financial oligarchy protected by the ancient fraud of a two-party electoral system. But the lists are not needed because I now see the gum MUST have come from inside the sock I wore yesterday, a sock which like all my clothes is washed in a machine outside this room where the clothes of other people (one of whom must be the Unknown Gumchewer) are also washed. UG accidentally attached the P for Pellet to a cardigan or other woollen article. UG’s helper (who is probably one of mine too) put it in the drum of a machine whose soapy solutions and hydraulic pressures dissolved most of the dirt but only displaced P for Pellet from the cardigan to the toe of my sock while the sock was inside out: its invariable state after I pull it off at night. Zoë or whoever else looks after me turns the cleaned socks the right way round at night before setting out a cleaned pair for me to put on next day. The fact that all my socks are grey like the Pellet would prevent Zoë or the other one seeing and removing it. Eureka!

I basked in the elegance of this solution for two or three happy and peaceful minutes. Since discovering the Pellet I had been rolling it idly between the ball of my right-hand thumb and forefinger. I was about to flick it into a pail-shaped metal waste-bin near the bed when something in its soft, plastic adhesiveness made me doubt if it was chewing-gum at all. It was very like a more recent invention called Blu-Tack, first marketed in the 1970s (I think) as a means of attaching paper notices and light pictorial reproductions to surfaces without puncturing or staining the notices, reproductions and surfaces. But there are no such things in my room. I don’t need them. Zoë’s chair in front of the window, the ash tree outside it give me all the entertainment and food for thought I need. Or have I forgotten something? Look suspiciously, carefully, at all nearby surfaces. Yes, there is something I forgot.

Beside my bed is a small metal wardrobe with wheels of a kind I have never before seen outside hospitals and homes for the chronically ill and disabled. On a side of this immediately opposite my face when I lie down is a paper document fastened by blobs of Blu-Tack at the two upper and the right-hand lower corner. This letter has a conventionally regal heading and a signature at the foot scribbled by Charles King number 3. The bit between signature and heading is very prettily printed or exquisitely typed, and congratulates me on attaining my hundredth birthday. Damn. Hell. F, no don’t use fuck as a curse word. Remember what I wrote in that review of the 1928 edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover : “Lawrence has restored to tender uses what should be the tenderest word in any language.” The Glasgow Herald sacked me for writing that review. I had guts in 1928. Perhaps that was my finest hour. But this letter which I tear down, crumple and fling into the waste-bin proves three unpleasant facts:

1. This is the 21st century.

2. Britain is still a damned and blasted monarchy.

3. I have not seen Zoë lately, or anybody else I know, because she and they died in the decade after Fluffy died, nearly twenty-five years ago.

I’m glad they left me Zoë’s chair.

It makes time travel easier.

This intelligent, kind old lady was once a school-teacher, and it shows in her forthright manners and alert appearance. On the station announcement board she reads that the 11.15 Aquarian from Bundlon to Shaglow will leave from platform H, and this worries her. While aware that her memory is failing she is sure station platforms used to be numbered, not lettered, so why the change? And walking along the platform she sees the carriages have very small square windows with rounded corners. The last time she travelled by rail the windows seemed to be big long glass panels that stretched the entire side of each carriage with hardly any interruption. She also remembers when carriages were divided into compartments like the insides of stage coaches, each with a door in the middle of either side, a door whose window could be raised or lowered by fitting holes in a thick leather strap onto shining brass studs. The handles of these old doors were shining brass levers. She stops and examines a door of a carriage near the front of the modern train. It has neither window nor handle, just a square plastic button in the middle with PRESS engraved on it. She presses. The door slides up like a blind. She steps through and it snaps down behind her.

She finds herself peering along a central corridor with rows of three high-backed seats on each side, all facing her. The backs of the six front seats hide all but the rows in front. Beside one window a sturdy old man sits reading a newspaper published by the British Orthodox Communist Party. The teacher nods approvingly, for though never a Communist she approves of radical politics. Beside the old man is a housewife with a worried expression, beside the woman a restless little child wearing a blue canvas suit. The teacher, proud of her ability to read character at a glance, decides these are three generations of a family belonging to the skilled artisan class. Beside the opposite window a middle-aged, middle-class couple sit bolt upright staring straight ahead. They seem to be ignoring each other, but with another approving nod the teacher sees on the arm-rest between them the man’s left hand clasping the woman’s right. The teacher sits in the empty seat beside this couple, saying to nobody in particular, “I suppose modern trains look like aeroplanes because they travel nearly as fast! I regret that because I hate air travel, but I’m glad our compartment is close to the bit that pulls — the bit we called the engine in the days of steam. I feel safer when I’m near the driver.”

“My father feels that way too, though he won’t admit it. Will you Dad?” says the housewife, but the old man mutters, “Shut up Miriam.”

“I feel that too dear,” murmurs the rigid lady to her husband who murmurs, “I know you do dear. Please shut up.”