Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

I could see the coast of Spain without raising my head. On bright afternoons a few long wisps of white vapour would trickle up into the sky from wide-apart points on the sides of the mountains. Perhaps it was a memory of old fairy-tales that made me think this smoke came from the huts of charcoal-burners. I tried to imagine myself wandering there and totally failed. Gibraltar has one of the Mediterranean’s moister climates and the view was often blotted out by low cloud. I also had an understanding with Major Mellors based upon definite but minimum communication. During the morning I might say, “Was it all right to tip the barber?”

      “Yes. How much did you give him?”

      “Ninepence.”

      “That was too much.”

      In the afternoon he might remark, on a wistful note, “l wonder how my garden’s getting on.”

      “ls there nobody looking after it?”

      “Oh yes, my servant Ali.”

      “Won’t he look after it properly?”

      “Oh yes, he’s very good with flowers.”

      But the most sociable time was between the half-past-five cup of tea and the seven o’clock breakfast when Sister Price sat at a table at our end of the ward. She was bright and talkative, and Sigurdson and the Major and l would interject and pass comments which seemed to us all increasingly witty and humorous. Yet l cannot now recall a single thing we said. The base of the conversation was four very different people wanting to enjoy and please each other and succeeding. For the rest of the day we were friendly in a quiet way which later struck me as British, or even European, when Mr Sweeney arrived.

      He was the first mate of a big American ship and was put in an empty bed beside Sigurdson. Had his flesh been firm he would have been a broad tough middle-aged man, but his cheeks were pouchy, he had a pouch under each eye, when not talking his mouth drooped to the left as if his muscles only kept hold of the right-hand corner. But he was usually talking because he could only think aloud. We learned he had a wife in America he seemed not to like much, and a daughter called Baby, living with the wife, whom he liked a great deal. “She’s well over forty, she’s twice divorced, but she’ll always be my Baby.”

      He was a Christian Scientist and said he had only come to hospital because the company he served could take away his pension if he refused. When disease or death was mentioned he would shrug and say, “After all, what is the body? Just fifty cents-worth of chemicalization.”

      If a silence lasted too long for him he sometimes broke it by remarking, at random, “After all, the only realities are spiritual realities.”

      Beneath his bed were three large cases from which he got the hospital porter to produce, at various times, many electrical gadgets connected with hygiene and grooming, cigars, tissues, a radio, three ball-pens which wrote in different colours, and a steel-barrelled pen filled with spirit ink to which could be fixed several thicknesses of felt nib. He did not converse. He might call one of us by name, but his loud, even voice was clearly addressing our entire half of the ward. Once he called out, “Say, Major! Could you lend me just a small spoonful of that toothpowder of yours and tomorrow l’ll give you back a whole tin of it?”

      “What’s that, old man?” said the Major, maybe playing for time.

      “Could you lend me one little spoonful of that tooth-powder of yours and tomorrow I’Il repay you with a whole big new tin of it? I got one in the case.”

      “Oh you mustn’t give away all your pretty things like that,” said the Major, gently.

      “Major, when I’m tired of giving I’ll be tired of living. If people are grateful, well and good. If not...”

      He frowned, his mouth sagged into its expression of slightly puzzled vacuity and for some minutes his eyes searched the ward uneasily for something to think about. At last they focused on a point beneath the table where the sister wrote her reports. “Say!” he said, brightening, “That’s the saddest waste-paper basket I ever did see! It’s twisted, it’s all to cock, it needs a new coat of paint ...” and then he ran out of thoughts again and eventually muttered that the only realities were spiritual realities.

      We were fascinated by Sweeney because he continually presented himself, which none of us did. At first meeting our accents had shown each other that Sigurdson was a Lancashire seaman, the Major an English army officer and I a well-read lowland Scot. The humorous pre-breakfast chats had confirmed this without adding detail. I knew the Major had commanded the household troops of some Moroccan or Algerian ruler, but had not heard it from his lips. He must have noticed that I was writing something larger than this report but my privacy did not disturb him. Mr Sweeney gave us his whole childhood in half a minute. “For the first twelve years of my life I was reared by my mother and wow, you should have seen me. Blue velvet suit. Satin shirt and necktie. Curly hair down to my shoulders. She had just about made a little girl of me when my pa came and took me to sea with him. She didn’t want it, I didn’t want it, but he said, ‘You’re gonna cry your eyes out but one day you’ll be grateful.’ And I cried. I guess I cried myself to sleep almost every night for six whole months. But after a year I was tough, I was a man, and I was grateful.”

      He was not embarrassed by his sexuality. One day the Major asked what he thought of the Japanese.

      “I like ’em. Collectively they’re skunks but individually I like ’em. I remember my ship putting into Yokohama in thirty-six. The Mayor entertained a few of us. I like Japanese homes. They’re clean. No furniture; you sit on mats on the floor. Nothing like that – ” he pointed to the top of his locker which, like our lockers, was littered with many more or less useful objects – “All that stuff is kept in a smooth box in the corner of the room. And there’s not much decoration either. But the room is built round an almond tree that comes out of a hole in the floor and goes out through one in the ceiling and the trunk and branches in the room have been given a coat of clear .... not varnish, but like varnish .... “

      “Lacquer?” I suggested.

      “Yeah. They’re lacquered. Well, nothing was too good for us. They saw we didn’t like their drink so without even asking they sent out for whisky. And when I went to bed, there she was. In a kimono. There are over fifty yards of silk in those kimonos. By the time she’d unwrapped herself I had almost lost my courage.”

      One day it was announced on the wireless that President Eisenhower had burst a small blood-vessel in his brain, his speech was impaired and he was confined to bed. Sweeney heard this with unusual gravity. He said, “He’s sixty-two. My age.” and was silent for a long time.

      “After all,” he said suddenly, “He’s an old man. What can you expect?”

      He complained of headache. The nurse on duty told him it would go away. “But what’s causing it?”

      He called the sister, then the matron, who both told him a codeine tablet would cure it. “I won’t take dope!” he cried, “You aren’t going to dope me!”

      He huddled silently under the bedclothes for over an hour. “After all,” he said suddenly, “He’s old. He’s not indispensable, even if he is the president. He’ll be replaced one day, just like the rest of us.”

      He clearly wanted to be persuaded that what he said was untrue. The Major and I kept glancing at each other with furtive, delighted grins, but we were glad when Eisenhower got well enough to make a speech and Mr Sweeney felt better. He was more entertaining when he was confident.

      The trustees may wonder why I have spent so many words describing this man. I do so for reasons that would have made me describe Toledo, had I reached Toledo. He displayed a coherent kind of life. I admired his language, which was terse, rapid, and full of concrete detail. I realized this was part of his national culture and found an impure form of it in an American magazine he read each week with great seriousness. “Everything in this is fact,” he explained, “lt prints nothing but the bare facts. Other magazines give you opinions. Not this one.”

      I borrowed it and read a report