The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray Page B

smash it down on your idiotic skull. But instead I will phone for the police if you do not take your poems and get the hell out of here.”
    â€œDearie me, dearie me,” he said waggishly. “I seem to have annoyed the poor old fat bald wee man. He must still envy me.I wonder why?”
    He strolled with bag and folder to the front door, which I opened. On the doorstep he turned and said quietly, “One last word of advice. Publish these poems under your own name then try to live up to them. You’ll fail, but the effort may make a real man of you, if not a real writer. And think of the fame you’ll enjoy! I won’t resent that because great poetry is more important than fame. Here, have it.”
    I closed the door on him. A moment later the folder, bent double, fell in through the letter box. My self respect felt as if it had been squeezed between the heavy rollers of a mangle. His poems were so strongly associated with this feeling that I could not bear to pick them up. Opening a cupboard holding gas meters I kicked them inside and locked them in. I so dreaded hearing from him again that I fixed an answering machine to my telephone and never took a call direct, but he never called again.
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    Time passed away. So did the Berlin Wall and the Russian Empire. In The Times Literary Supplement I read reviews of abstruse books by the former MarxistStudent who liked classical opera and now had a medical practice in Stuttgart. I discovered that the little Chinese girl who once visited me was now an award-winning feminist poet who wrote popular, very gruesome crime thrillers under a pseudonym. I read her works closely for signs of my influence and detected none at all.
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    One day I heard a friendly, eager voice say, “Hullo, how are you doing? What are you reading these days?”
    I stopped and after a moment recognised poor Aiblins. He was completely bald with many bruises on his head and face and many unhealed cuts between them. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and shambled in a way I had not seen before, but his battered features had amazingly recovered the happily relaxed expression I had first envied.
    â€œWhat happened to your face, Luke?”
    â€œOh, I had an argument in a pub with a man who glassed me so it became a police matter. I mean the police took me in and gave me a doing before turning me out. But it was all just usual reality, it doesnae matter. Have you read The American Claimant yet?”
    â€œNot yet. Can I buy you a drink?”
    I said this because we were in a street very far from where we might be seen by people I know.
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    After two unsuccessful attempts we found a pub that would serve him and sat with pints in a quiet corner. I admitted I had not yet read Two Gentlemen of Verona and steered the talk away from literature by asking if he ever saw his wife nowadays. “Neither her nor my son. In fact she kicked me out before he was born because she hated the name I was going to give him – a lovely name it was too, a perfect poem in itself: Tristram Pilgrim Aiblins .” He announced the name with great enthusiasm then repeated it slowly as if separately enjoying each syllable, then he asked if I knew what it meant.
    â€œ Tristram means sadly born ,” I said, “I’m not surprised the mother didn’t want her boy called that.”
    â€œYou’ve forgotten what Aiblins means. That makes a difference.”
    â€œWhat does Aiblins mean?”
    â€œLook it up, wordsmith,” he said, laughing. “Consult a Lallans dictionary,you antique Scottish nebula.”
    â€œBut how did you know a son was coming before he got born?”
    He tapped his brow saying, “I heard it in here.”
    I asked if his inner voice ever gave him poetry nowadays. He said, “I think it’s trying to. Sometimes a good line gets through but never a whole couplet or verse because the government is jamming me.”
    â€œThe