The Acid House Page 11

  Stephanie lay on the bed naked, enjoying the sense of brief contentment. It was fleeting; she knew her heart would hollow and she'd soon feel tense and debased again, her self-esteem starting to crumble at the edges like a faulty dam. She unplugged the vibrator, which was wet with her come, then pulled herself off the bed and went through to the bathroom.

  Frank looked at the deflating plastic doll, its latex vagina filled with his semen. It seemed to be dissolving simultaneously with his erection. His genitals looked like an ugly, embarrassing growth; alien, external to his self. The doll now just looked like what it was: a sheet of plastic spilling from a grotesque mannequin head.

  Later that evening, Stephanie passed Frank in the hallway. She was going out to see an arthouse movie and she was going alone. He was returning from the Chinese takeaway with some food. They blushed in mutual recognition, then he smiled meekly at her, and she timidly returned the compliment. He cleared his throat to speak. — It's raining outside, he lisped self-consciously.

  — Is it? Stephanie replied shakily.

  — Quite heavy, Frank mumbled.

  They stood facing each other for an excruciating few seconds, both lost for words. Then they smiled in tense synchronicity before Frank retreated to his room and Stephanie marched down the hall. Out of sight of each other, both stiffened as if trying to stop the spasm, that pulse of pain, self-loathing and embarrassment.

  LISA'S MUM MEETS THE QUEEN MUM

  I was so excited when we met the Queen Mum; oh, it was marvellous. It was a shame about my little girl Lisa's presentation to her. That bit went horribly wrong. It was my little girl Lisa, her fault. Didn't understand, you see. I've always told Lisa to tell the truth: truth at all times, madam, I tell her. Well, you never really know what to tell them these days, do you?

  The Queen Mum was coming to Ilford to open Lisa's new infant school. The local MP was going to be there too. We was ever so thrilled when Lisa was picked to present the Queen Mum with the bouquet of flowers. I had Lisa practising her curtseying all the time. Anybody who came in I'd say: show Mummy your curtsey, Lisa, the one you're going to do for the Queen's mummy ...

  Cause she really is lovely, the Queen Mum, ain't she? Really, really, really, really, lovely. We was ever so excited. My mum was going back to the time when she met the Queen Mum at the Festival of Britain. She's really lovely, marvellous for her age; the Queen Mum that is, not my mum. Mind you, my mum's a treasure, I don't know what I would've done without her, after Derek left me. Yeah, I wouldn't swap my mum for all the Queen Mums in the world, really.

  Anyway, Mrs Kent, that's Lisa's headmistress, said to me that Lisa would be lovely presenting the Queen Mum with the bouquet. My friend Angela went a bit funny with me, because her little girl, Sinead, wasn't picked. I suppose that I'd have been the same if it had been the other way around and Sinead had got picked instead of Lisa. It was the Queen Mum after all. It don't happen every day, does it?

  Well she looked really lovely, the Queen Mum, really really lovely; a lovely hat she had on. I was ever so proud of Lisa, I just wanted to tell the whole world; that's my little gel Lisa! Lisa West, Golfe Road Infants, Ilford actually .. .

  So Lisa hands over the bouquet, but she didn't curtsey nice, not nice n proper like we'd practised. The Queen Mum takes the bouquet and bends down to give Lisa a little kiss but Lisa turns away with her little face all screwed up and runs over to me.

  That old lady's got bad breath and smells of wee, Lisa said to me. This was in front of all the other mums and Mrs Kent and Mrs Fry n all. Mrs Fry was ever so upset.

  You're a naughty little girl, Lisa! Mummy's ever so cross, I told her.

  I'm sure I saw my friend Angela sniggering out of the side her mouth, the rotten cow.

  Well, she was smiling on the other side of her face when Mrs Kent took me over to the Queen Mum and introduced me as Lisa's mum! The Queen Mum was lovely. Nice to meet you again, Mister Chamberlain, she said to me. Poor thing must get a bit confused, all these people she meets. They work ever so hard, you've got to give them that. Not like some I could mention, Derek, Lisa's dad, being a case in point. Not that I'm going into that little story just now, thank you very much.

  Another thing was that Lisa had managed to get a stain down the front of her dress. I hoped the Queen Mum didn't notice. Just wait till I get you home, madam, I thought. Ooh, I was ever so cross. Really, really cross.

  THE TWO PHILOSOPHERS

  It was damn hot for Glasgow, Lou Ornstein thought, as he pulled his sweating body into the Byres Road hostelry. Gus McGlone was already at the bar, chatting to a young woman.

  — Gus, how goes it? Ornstein asked, slapping his friend on the shoulder.

  — Ah Lou. Very well indeed. And yourself?

  — Great, Ornstein said, noting that McGlone's attention was still very much centred on the young woman.

  The woman whispered something to McGlone, then flashed Ornstein a searing smile which was all teeth and eyes. It cut through him. — Professor Ornstein, she began in the Scotch tearoom accent he found so attractive, — at the risk of sounding sycophantic I just wanted to say that your paper on the rational construction of magic was just superb.

  — Why thank you. I shall accept that as a scholarly, rather than sycophantic view, Ornstein smiled. He thought that was quite a self-conscious response, but hell, he was an academic.

  — I find your central hypothesis interesting ... the young woman continued, as Ornstein felt a small pellet of resentment crystallise in his breast. This day was about drinking beer, not conducting an involuntary seminar with one of Gus's naive students. Oblivious to his growing unease, the woman continued, — ... tell me, if you don't mind, how do you distinguish between what you call 'unknown science' and what we generally refer to as magic?

  I do goddamn mind, thought Ornstein. Pretty young women were all the same; completely goddamned self-obsessed. He had had to earn the right to be self-obsessed, to slog his guts out in libraries for years and brown-nose the right people, generally assholes who you wouldn't piss upon if they were on fire. Along comes some some nineteen-year-old undergrad destined for at best a lower second honours, who thinks that her opinion counts, that she's important, just because she has a sweet face and a god-given ass. The horrible thing, the worst goddamn thing about it, thought Ornstein, was that she was absolutely right.

  — He can't, McGlone smugly remarked.

  This intervention by his old adversary was enough to set Ornstein off. Accepting his pint of eighty shilling, he began, — Don't listen to this old Popperian cynic. These guys are just anti-social science, which means anti-science, and each generation of them get increasingly goddamn juvenile in their analysis. My contention is a fairly standard materialist proposition: so-called unexplained phenomena are merely scientific blind-spots. We have to accept the inherently logical concept of further knowledge outside of the human range of what we consciously, and even sub-consciously know. Human history illustrates this; our forefathers would have described the sun, or the internal combustion engine as magic, when they are nothing of the kind. Magic, like ghosts and all that stuff, it's just hocus-pocus bullshit for the ignorant, while unknown science is a phenomena that we may or may not be able to observe but cannot yet explain. That does not mean that it is inexplicable; merely that it cannot be explained with due reference to our current body of knowledge. That body of knowledge is constantly expanding; some day we will be able to explain unknown science.

  — Don't get him started, Fiona, McGlone smiled, — he'll go on all night.

  — Not if you don't beat me to it. Indoctrinating your students with Popperian orthodoxies.

  — Indoctrination's what the other side do, Lou. We educate, McGlone smiled. The two philosophers laughed at that one, an old quip from their student days. Fiona, the young student, excused herself. She had a lecture to attend. The two philosophers watched her leave the pub.

  — One of my brightest undergrads, McGlone smirked.

 
— Terrific ass, Ornstein nodded.

  They adjourned to a conspiratorial corner of the pub. Lou took a mouthful of beer. — It's great to see you again, Gus. But listen buddy, we gotta enter into a pact. As much as I enjoy coming through to Glasgow to see you, I get a little pissed at us going through the same argument. No matter how much we say we ain't gonna do it, we always go back to the Popper-Kuhn debate.

  McGlone gave a sombre nod. — It's a pain in the arse. It's made our careers, but it seems to overshadow our friendship. You were just in the door and we were at it again. It's always the same. We talk about Mary, Philippa, the kids, then we go back to work, slag off a few people. As the bevvy takes effect, it's back to Popper-Kuhn. Problem is, Lou, we're philosophers. Debate and argument are as natural to us as breathing is to others.

  This was indeed the case. They had argued with each other over the years; in bars, at conferences and in print in philosophical journals. They had started off as undergraduate students of philosophy at Cambridge University, developing a bond of friendship, based on drinking and womanising; the former usually conducted with more success than the latter.

  Both men swam against the ideological tide of their country's culture. The Scot Gus McGlone was a supporter of the Conservative Party. He regarded himself as a classical liberal, a descendant of Hume and Ferguson, though he found the classical economists, even Adam Smith, and his latter disciples with philosophical bents like Hayek and Friedman, a little bland. His real hero was Karl Popper, whom he had studied under as a post-graduate student in London. As a follower of Popper's, he was antagonistic to what he saw as the deterministic theories of Marxism and Freudianism and what he considered to be the attendant dogma of their disciples.

  The American Lou Ornstein, a Chicago-born Jew, was a convinced rationalist, who believed in Marxist dialectical materialism. His interest was science and scientific ideas. He was greatly influenced by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn's concept that the rightness of pure science does not necessarily prevail. If ideas went against the current paradigm, they would be rejected by vested interests. Such ideas, while perhaps scientific 'truths', rarely become recognised as such until the pressure for change becomes unbearable. This, Ornstein felt, was in tune with his political belief in the need for revolutionary social change.

  Ornstein and McGlone had had parallel careers, working together in London and then in Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively. McGlone had advanced to a professorial chair about eight months before Ornstein. This irked the American, who considered his friend's elevation had been the result of the political fashionability of his ideas under the Thatcher paradigm. Ornstein contented himself with noting he had a greater publication track record.

  The natural political antagonism of the two men was centred around a famous debate between Kuhn and Popper. Popper, who had established himself as a great philosopher by attacking the approaches of the intellectual nineteenth-century giants Sig-mund Freud and Karl Marx, and what he saw as the partisanship associated with their ideologies, was less than temperate when he himself had his views of scientific progression attacked by Thomas Kuhn, in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

  Yet one thing was agreed on by both Ornstein and McGlone: the argument, which was their bread and butter, always spilled over from the professional into the personal. They tried all sorts of ways to break this pattern, but nothing could prevent this energy-sapping subject from re-emerging. On a couple of occasions, the friends, exasperated and drunk, had almost come to blows.

  — I wish we could find some way to keep it to the journals and conferences and out of our shitfaced sessions, Lou mused.

  — Yeah, but how? We've tried everything. I've tried using your arguments, you've tried using mine; we've agreed to say nothing but it inevitably resurfaces. What can we do?

  — I think I know a way out of this cul-de-sac, Gus, Lou gave a coy look.

  — What are you suggesting?

  — Independent arbitration.

  — Come on, Lou. No philosopher, no member of our peers could satisfy us as to their independence of mind. They would have formed a prior view on the issue.

  — I'm not suggesting a peer. I'm suggesting we find someone in the street, or better still, a pub, and advance our propositions, and let them decide which is the superior argument.

  — Ridiculous!

  — Hold on, Gus, hear me out. I'm not suggesting for one minute that we let go of our academic standpoints on the basis of one informed opinion. That would be ludicrous.

  — What are you suggesting?

  — I'm suggesting that we have to split the professional from the personal. Let's remove the argument from our social context by letting another party judge the relative merits of our propositions from that social, pub point of view. It will prove nothing academically, but at least it will let us see whose argument is the most user-friendly for the average man in the street.

  — Mmmm... I suppose that way we can accept that our various arguments have strengths and weaknesses with the lay person.. .

  — Exactly. What we are doing is subjecting those ideas to the real world where they are not discussed, the world of our drinking. What we are agreeing to is giving the victor's ideas sovereignty in the pub context.

  — This is nonsense, Lou, but it's interesting nonsense and good sport. I accept your challenge, not because it will validate anything, but because it will hold the loser to shutting up about the scientific logic debate.

  They shook hands firmly. Ornstein then took McGlone onto the underground at Hillhead station. — Too many student and intelligentsia types around here, Gus. The last thing I wanna do is get into some discussion with some squeaky undergrad fuck. We need a better laboratory for this little experiment.

  Gus McGlone was somewhat uneasy when they alighted at Govan. Despite the Glasgow wide-boy persona he cultivated, he was in fact from Newton Mearns and had led quite a closeted life. It was easy to con the impressionable bourgeois who filled the University staff-rooms mat he was the genuine article. In somewhere like Govan, it was another matter.

  Lou strode purposefully down the street. There was a feel to the place, a mixture of the traditional and the new, and the huge gap sites reminded him of the Jewish-Irish neighbourhood he'd grown up in on Chicago's North Side. Gus McGlone sauntered behind him, trying to affect a casualness he didn't feel. Ornstein stopped an old woman in the street.

  — Pardon me, ma'am, can you tell us where the nearest pubis?

  The small woman dropped her shopping bag, turned around and pointed across the road. — Yir right here, son.

  — Brechin's Bar! Excellent, Lou enthused.

  — It's Breekins Bar, not Bretchins, Gus corrected Lou.

  — As in Brechin City, right? Brechin City two, Forfar one, yeah?

  — Yeah.

  — So the guys that drink in here must root for Brechin City.

  — I think not, Gus said, as two men in blue scarves exited from the bar. There was a big game on today at Ibrox; Rangers versus Celtic. Even McGlone, who had little interest in football, knew that.

  They went in. The formica-topped island bar was busy, with some groups of men watching TV, others playing dominoes. There were only two women in the place. One was a barmaid of indeterminate middle age, the other a slavering old drunkard. A group of young men in blue scarves were singing a song about something that their father wore, which Lou couldn't quite make out. — Is that a Scottish football song? he asked Gus.