Graithnock. Oy vey, with a Scottish accent.
‘I have seen the future and it works’ (Lincoln Steffens). He had seen the present and it didn't work. He looked round the apartment where he was holing up, surrounded by someone else's furniture. This was what he had achieved? He was a recluse among half a million people. He owned nothing but some books - no house, no car, no prospects. He hadn't just burned his boats, he had burnt the blueprint for them. He had stopped visiting old friends, owing to his present tendency to bleed verbally all over their carpets. He was trying to stop inhaling whisky as if it was an oxygen substitute. His finances were a shambles swiftly degenerating into a chaos. This was what he had earned? Lodgings in a stranger's place? Emotional destitution? The melodramatic possibility of suicide nipped in and out of the flat like a dubious friend wondering if he could help that day. Otherwise, things were fine.
He was trying to do that sum again, the addition and subtraction of experience - what did it come to? How did you quantify the dreams that died, the gifts you gave and were given, the promises you thought the world made and then broke, the remembered moments that still shone like pure gold, the wonderful faces, the death of the best, the laughter that turned banality into carnival, the purifying angers, the great dead minds that whispered their secrets to you in the early hours of many mornings, the bitter sweetness of family, the incorrigible contradictoriness of living? By remembering?
HE SITS UP IN BED SUDDENLY and says, ‘Mahatma Gandhi.’
He is staring into a dimness delicately brushed with half-light from the greying embers of the fire. The furniture of the living-room has a sheen of gentle aging. The sideboard could be an antique. The biscuit barrel sitting on top of it, where his mother keeps the rent money, might as well be an Etruscan vase. The clock above the fireplace is keeping a time that doesn't seem the present. He is awake in a room he cannot recognise.
He is frozen at the sound of his own voice. Where did that come from? He has been experiencing that familiar sensation of standing at the edge of a clifftop on which the ground is crumbling under his feet and he is falling when the speaking aloud of that name jerks him clear and leaves him sitting upright in his bed.
He listens. He is glad no one has heard. It's a good thing he sleeps in the fold-down bed in the living-room. He can keep his madness private. His family are sanely asleep upstairs.
Mahatma Gandhi? Where did he come from? Almost immediately Tam knows that the small, skinny man in the Indian frock has wandered out of his own most potent obsession: his wondering about ways of how people get it.
‘It' - in the darkness of his head he lets that cryptic cipher open out into some of the variations he has heard it given and repeats them to himself like a satanic litany: your hole, sex, rumpy-pumpy, intercourse, making love, houghmagandie, ‘you know’ (with a smile), a ride, a bit of the other, a shag, hi-diddle-diddle, copulation, sexual union, ‘Christ, it was incredible!’
Why were there so many names for it? Were there that many different ways to do it? And if it was so various, springing up everywhere like a genus of weed with a thousand species, how come you'd managed to avoid it so far? You had heard it called about a hundred things. (You could almost bet that any euphemism you heard and didn't understand, that's what it meant.) But you'd never had it. You had read it, thought it, heard it, certainly mimed it, and once been sure you smelled it, but you had never felt it. To judge from what you'd been told, it was running amuck like the bubonic plague and you were boringly, agonisingly immune.
He can't believe it. It winks and nods at him from everywhere but won't come out to play. What is wrong with him?
He remembers having to translate The Anabasis in the Greek class. And that's another thing: Latin and Greek at school - what does that have to do with living in Graithnock? He can't remember the woman's name now but it was someone who came to see Cyrus of Persia about something. At least he thinks it was Cyrus. It could have been Xerxes. But he had to translate the passage.
He had looked up the words. When the Greek appeared before him, he said, ‘It is said he lay with her.’ He got it right. He was good at translation. He could translate one word into another word. But what the hell did it mean? It is said he lay with her? All right, he was in third year at that time but he was fifteen going on five. He lay with her?
All Dusty Thomas said was, ‘Well done, Docherty.’ That was well done? He had translated it from one foreign language into another foreign language. He felt like screaming, ‘But what did the bastard do? (He likes swearing in his head.)
He hasn't just read about it in Greek. Being so bookish, he has tracked it down in a lot of places. He has even memorised some of the references. ‘His need pistoned into her.’ ‘She screamed in agonised ecstasy.’ He sometimes says the words to himself like a wine-taster with no taste-buds. He follows the spoor of those references round and round without finding any corresponding reality in his own experience until he begins to think that he is tracking a beast which, perhaps only in his private world, has become extinct.
But he continues to brood on ways of how to get it. No medieval alchemist was ever more obsessive in his search for the philosopher's stone. Out there is gold - pure, undiluted sex. He has to discover the formula that will transmute the base metal of cafes and the dancing and brassieres that seem welded to the body and skirts that defy levitation into the transcendental shining of doing it.
He studies much. He will read or hear things that will stop him dead and leave him staring into space, wondering if he has come upon the key that will unlock the golden hoard. Sometimes the revelation will only come in retrospect. He will be lying, as now, in his fold-down bed in the living-room, the house quiet as a mouse's breathing, and the turmoil of his mind will become very still, transfixed. That thing he has read or heard. Of course. Is that what he has been looking for? Has he reached the culmination of his quest?
Yes. That is the news the Mahatma brings him. For he read recently of Gandhi's determined search for physical purity. Apparently he thought that intercourse with women (and, therefore, presumably with men) should be avoided because they took away a man's vital juices. (To judge by that criterion. Tam must be so full of vital juices they are coming out his ears. Purity? He sought physical purity, did he? No problem. Here was the answer in three words: be Tam Docherty.)
The person who was writing about Gandhi was full of praise for the Mahatma's constant need to prove how pure he was, how immune to temptation. In order to do this, he would take different young women to bed with him. They must sleep together without having sex. That way, he could prove his purity was still intact. The writer was in awe of such holy self-denial.
Sitting up in bed. Tam realises that his own reaction is completely different. How could he have read so carelessly as to let the writer's attitude simply become his own, without examining it? He is always doing that. He reads something in a book or a newspaper, or he listens to someone, and it may be two days later when he thinks, ‘What a load of shite that was! Why did I accept it?’ He feels that now.
The thought that comes to him as he sits upright on his lonely bed, bathed in illumination, is a simple one, stunningly clear. ‘Mahatma, you fly, old bastard.’ For it was perfect, wasn't it? You had it either way. You couldn't lose. If you didn't manage to perform, your purity had triumphed. If you had sex, it was a sad lapse from your desired standards and you must try again. And again and again and again. Ya beauty. No pressure. The ultimate, self-indulgent con. The man was a genius.
Tam is staring ahead, hardly daring to breathe in case he displaces the brilliant idea that is forming in his mind. He is already calling it The Gandhi Technique. It is a marvellous way to get a woman into bed. He finds himself going through a leisurely selection process. This sustains his exhilarated optimism for fully half an hour until realism intrudes like a burglar into the privacy of his meditation.
To make the technique work, you first of all have to become more or less world-famous. It is dependent on the veneration of others, their preparedness to believe whatever you say is your motivation. That seems to let him out.
When he explains to them the lofty reasons why they must come to bed with him, his eyes brimming with religious sincerity, he can't imagine any of the