Futuretrack 5

by Robert Westall

  “This is heaven. …”

  “No, it’s not. Look!”

  Two hundred yards ahead, a Wire stretched across the countryside. A gate, with Paramils. A motorway, full of robos. Unbearable; we turned back, quick.

  “This is another enclave,” I said. “Fifty miles across, but just another enclave.”

  “An enclave for what?”

  “I think it’s called the Fens. They grow all the fresh vegetables and meat. …”

  “For the bloody Ests!”

  “Yeah, but there’s something funny. It’s too big… too historical… too preserved. I’m just starting to realise how little they ever told us Techs. And the Ests never wanted to know. …”

  “They never told us Unnems nothing.”

  “I wonder if this has something to do with Scott-Astbury?”

  Her face pinched up. “Shut up. I’m happy.”

  Ely was like a huge village. It was market day, and even the enormous towers of the cathedral seemed engulfed by the market that flourished round their base. Mountains of cauliflowers, cascades of carrots with the earth still sticking to them. Piled crates of pigeons, hens, rabbits.

  “Them hens isn’t for eating, are they?” “No. Hens lay eggs. Rabbits is for eating.” “What—even them baby ones?” There was a hutch full of babies, flaked-out asleep with terror or boredom. But one, chinchilla blue, was standing on its hind legs and peering out at us.

  “That one wants to live—let’s buy him.”

  “Don’t be daft. How can we cope with a rabbit?”

  “He wants to be free. He trusts us.”

  “More fool him.” I looked from her to the rabbit. They looked a right daft pair, her eyes shining, its nose twitching. The rabbit pummelled the wire, as if it sensed its moment had come.

  “That rabbit,” I said, “is a very bad chooser. I’d rather be rabbit pie than go to a lobo-farm.” But I asked the guy how much it was.

  “Three credits to you, mate. Fatten up nicely, with plenty of dandelion.” I thought Keri was going to hit him.

  As far as I know, that rabbit was the first ever to enter Ely Cathedral. Perhaps the verger mistook it for a fur collar on Keri’s leathers. It nibbled furtively at her hair, as we walked round the massive columns of the nave.

  “I’m sure God exists,” announced Keri, squinting shrewdly up at the soaring vaulting of the crossing tower. “Why else would they go to all this bother?”

  At dusk, we were idling through yet another village, conserving our batteries, when a delightful smell hit us, making our diet of fruit feel suddenly sloshy and unfilling. There was a dim, rosy window at the end of the street.

  DE-LISH FISH BAR

  YOUR SATISFACTION IS OUR JUSTIFICATION

  THE FINEST FRIED FISH IN THE FENS

  MUSHY PEAS SPECIAL lc

  EELS OUR SPECIALITY

  DO NOT LEAN BIKES AGAINST THIS WINDOW.

  There was a gaggle of ancient petrol-driven motorbikes parked against the window: AJS, Ariel, Norton, even a Scott Flying Squirrel. We pushed our noses against the steamed-up glass. Inside, by the light of red-shaded wall lamps with tasseled fringes, a man and woman in filthy whites were dumping avalanches of potatoes and dripping fish into great shining troughs.

  “Techs?” asked Keri slyly; dodged before I could kick her.

  An avid crowd of guys in old-fashioned fringed leathers waited, punching each other in the kidneys cheerfully, or shaking salt and vinegar into each other’s greasy hair.

  “Two whales and chips, please, Agnes!”

  “Two battered cod and three battered wives.”

  “I’ll batter you,” said Agnes, raising a large implement dripping with fat.

  “You won’t get a better offer, Razzer. She’s dead kinky wi’ that fish slice. Better’n flagellation.”

  Keri said, “What are chips?”

  “Let’s go and find out.”

  When we came out with our sizzling packets, there was a crowd around Mitzi.

  “Trouble?” muttered Keri.

  “Leave this to me.” We strolled over.

  “This your bike, mate?”

  “What’ll she do?”

  “Right snazzer—shaft-driven.”

  “Funny tires.” They kicked them affectionately, making Mitzi wobble.

  “Where’s the petrol tank?”

  “Mitsubishi—Jap, right? Tommo here’s got an old Honda.”

  “What about a ride?” asked Razzer, a big kid with a shock of black hair and heavy jaw, obviously the leader. I got astride and gave him the nod. As he was settling, I shot off, making three kids jump for their life. Razzer enjoyed that. When we got to Nine Mile Bank, I fed on the juice, nearly left him sitting in the road.

  “Not bad.” He leaned his unhelmeted face across my shoulder and read the speedo. “Hundred an’ eighty. Miles?”

  “Kilometres.”

  He whistled. “Engine’s got a funny beat.”

  “Electric.”

  “Electric starter?”

  “All electric.”

  “You’re kidding? …”

  A suspicion was forming in my mind. When we got back to the mob I announced, “This is the famous Keri Roberts.”

  “Hi, Kerry,” they said, casually as if I’d announced she was Margi or Jane.

  They had no idea who she was at all.

  “Haven’t you seen her on the Box?” I asked.

  “What box? A top box? She can sit on my top box any time.”

  Then I knew why the houses had no TV aerials…

  We spent another half-hour, giving them rides. In return, they let Keri ride theirs. She did a wheelie at sixty, the whole length of the village street. Got happier and happier, just as she had with the Glasgow Racers, at first. Only these weren’t like Racers; they kept on playing daft tricks and laughing. We all got on so well that I finally popped the sixty-four-credit question.

  “Is there anywhere we can stay the night? Bike’s a bit low on juice…”

  There was a horrible hush. They looked at us, as if seeing us for the first time. As if others before us had asked that question, and it had always meant trouble.

  Then Razzer said, “We’ll take you to Pete. Pete’ll fix it.”

  “Pete fixes our bikes.”

  “He can fix anything.”

  “It’s your head needs fixing, Tommo. Even Pete can’t fix that.”

  We all went off to see Pete.

  Chapter 18

  Pete lived in a straggling village called Manea. They left us with him; roaring off, shouting good night loudly, as if glad to get away from a funeral.

  Pete finished waving and turned to us. Odd-looking bloke, bald on top but with a mass of wild red locks lower down, so that his hair looked as if it was slipping off his head. He had a long, shiny nose and small, shrewd blue eyes. There were still white wood-shavings in his hair and beard, and he was still chewing his supper. Bacon and eggs, from his breath.

  He looked at us very straight. He always did, Pete.

  “We’ve had your sort before. It never works. They get bored and do stupid things. Then the inspectors pick them up. …”

  “We could do with a bit of boredom, what we’ve been through …”

  He nodded, sighed. He wanted to refuse us, but for some reason couldn’t. He looked pretty weary then. I almost said, “Don’t bother.” But I was tired, too.

  “It’s not much,” he said. “But you’re welcome to it.” He went into the house and came out with a rusty key, and led us down a brick garden path past ranked masses of beetroot, broad beans, heavenly sweetpeas. All growing hugely, like a jungle. The bees, even now, were busy in the dim light. It was funny, because beyond the fence was a garage with a solitary rusty petrol pump and juggers parked, their engines ticking as they cooled. The smell of diesel came up from the black, oily, barren earth, mingling with the sweetpeas.

  There was a black hut—no, an old, tar-painted railway carriage, wheels removed, a brick chimney built onto on
e corner. He went inside, lit a big hanging oil lamp with a cracked pink shade. Its light revealed a great brass bedstead piled with folded grey blankets. Hung on the wall was an old photo of Ely Cathedral, in a crude, do-it-yourself frame.

  “There’s grub… odds and ends.” He pulled open a cupboard door, revealing a packet of salt, a tin of syrup, and two candle ends. “Oh, come down to the house when you wake up and Joan’ll give you some breakfast. Good night!… Oh,” he paused in the doorway, “hang up this flypaper—it’s a regulation. We’re bothered with flies… we manure from our own earth closets and flies cause tummy upsets. It’s the one sensible thing the inspectors do—make everybody use flypapers.” He pulled out a round blue package, tore off the wrapper, and let it run out. It was simply a yard’s length of sticky, transparent, yellow paper, with a loop for hanging up at one end, and a round, weighted cylinder of bright blue plastic at the other. As he held it, a stray fly settled on the sticky stuff, got caught, and buzzed tinnily. Pete put the flypaper into my hand. “Good night.” He pulled the door to,

  with a careful click. His footsteps went slopping off down the brick path.

  “I like him,” said Keri.

  I swung the flypaper by its loop, looking for a place to hang it. The hut was full of tiny flies, buzzing in the warm darkness.

  “Hang it over the bed,” said Keri. “I can’t bear having flies touching my face while I’m asleep.”

  I went on looking at the swinging flypaper in my hand. “This thing’s fifty years out of date.”

  “Everything’s out of date here. I like it.” She began to shake out the blankets. “I could sleep for a week.”

  “This blue plastic cylinder at the end’s funny. It’s hollow but…“I shook it. “There’s something heavy inside.”

  “It’s just to make the flypaper hang straight—stops it curling up.” She thumped the blue-striped pillows into fatness.

  “I wonder.” I pulled out my pocketknife. There was a narrow crack round the end of the blue cylinder. I put in the knife and twisted. The end fell off onto the floor, and something small, shiny, and metallic fell after it.

  “A mickey mouse,” I said bitterly. “A listening device. No wonder they don’t need psychopters, with a listening device in every room. No home should be without one.”

  In the dim lamplight she suddenly looked old. “D’you think… Pete knew?”

  “No… he’s got one hanging in his own window. They’re bloody babes in arms round here. It’s no wonder people like us get picked up by the inspectors… except, with thousands of flypapers in use… how can the Paramils tell which house?”

  “I mentioned Pete’s name. …”

  “Must be hundreds of Petes. Maybe we’ll be okay for a bit… especially if I …” I opened the old tin of syrup and carefully dropped the mickey mouse in. “That’ll give them a lot of sweet nothings.”

  “We might have been making love or anything,” said Keri. “I feel sick.”

  “It’d be all right to make love now,” I said. Without hope; just to take her mind off it.

  “No, it’s not—just the thought of it!”

  I stirred the mickey mouse round viciously. Tiny air bubbles emerged and hung immobile in the syrup as if the thing was drowning. When I was satisfied, I spooned it out, put it back in its plastic container, and hung the flypaper over the bed.

  We started to undress by the mellow glow. It wasn’t romantic. Keri took off her jacket, then said, “Stop watching me.”

  “I wasn’t,” said I, turning my back very ostentatiously.

  “Well, don’t.”

  I don’t know if it was the mickey mouse or the look of the great bed, in which generations of Fenmen must have been born. But we slept apart, for the first time in weeks, at the extreme edges, like the North and South Poles. I thought sadly that the only way to get near her would be to grow handlebars on my head.

  I wakened to see her face across mountain ranges of grey blanket. She was awake, staring at the flypaper.

  “It’s dead,” I snarled. “Microphones don’t work when they’re full of treacle.”

  “I keep feeling sorry for the flies. They give up awfully quickly; even the big ones. Like people. …”

  The flypaper was black with insects, mainly still. But one bluebottle still had a leg loose and was waving it defiantly.

  “That one’s me,” I said. “Waving to my passing girl friend and she won’t even look at me.”

  “Don’t—that’s not funny.” She shuddered, exposing one creamy shoulder.

  “This fly wants breakfast.” I jumped out of bed quickly, before that creamy shoulder tempted me to do something stupid. I had a feeling, from the back of my neck, that she had no objections to watching me get dressed. But when I turned quickly, she was staring at the flypaper again.

  I got some very cold water from the rainwater barrel outside, in a rose-painted bowl. We scraped a wash between us. Walked down the path and knocked timidly on the half-open door and there, just inside, was Pete at breakfast. Mouth incredibly full, he gestured us in. “Joan!” he managed to get out, in a splutter of breadcrumbs.

  She appeared, wiping her hands on a flowered apron. A big girl, with an oddly delicate head set on a long slender neck and a lot of straight blond hair, beautifully washed. “Don’t mind Pete—bacon and egg’s his favourite accent. They come here with microphones to record him eating and singing at the same time—he’ll probably distort the Fenland sound archives. Come in—I expect you’re ready to talk the same language.”

  We sat in silence and watched Pete. He ate with the same swift craftsmanship as he did everything. Joan went into a dark corner and cut chunks of bacon off a whole side of pig hanging from the ceiling. Keri went a bit green. Then Joan cracked eggs into the frying pan that still had straw and little feathers on them, stuck in place with hen’s droppings. But the smell was terrific, and Keri changed her mind after the first mouthful.

  “Don’t they feed you, where you come from?” asked Joan. “Where do you come from?”

  Keri’s eyes, terrified, swivelled to the flypaper in the window. Then she ducked straight into another mouthful of bacon, nodding her head vigorously.

  “Yeah, where are you from?” asked Pete, mouth empty for a brief second. “You can talk in front of Joan.” Again Keri’s eyes swivelled to the flypaper.

  “We’ve got ten times as many flies on our flypaper as you have on yours,” I said, trying to steer the conversation onto safer ground.

  “Really?” asked Pete, suddenly interested.

  “I’ll go and get it,” I said. I had some crazy notion of substituting our flypaper for theirs.

  Pete duly admired ours. “I wonder why you catch more flies?”

  “Shed be always full of flies,” said Joan. But Pete was examining our flypaper with narrowed eyes. “The bottom’s sticky. …”

  “That’s the secret,” I said. “Dip that plastic bit in treacle and you’ll catch a lot more flies. Try it!”

  “I will.” Pete dropped his flypaper straight in the breakfast marmalade, ignoring Joan’s protests.

  “Stick it well under,” I said viciously, “and leave it for five minutes.”

  “We come from London,” said Keri, getting her voice and color back. She and Joan got prattling and she was soon led off to inspect some home-brewed beer, fermenting in the pantry.

  Pete watched the flies coming to his newly dipped flypaper. “Yeah, it really works.” That was always his highest praise: “Yeah, it really works.” He gave me an old-fashioned look. “You’re not the usual sort we get out of London—bald, with green hair, all that stuff.”

  “I’m interested in how things work.”

  “Have a look at this. I’m trying to mend it.” The silent works of a grandfather clock hung from a high shelf on the wall.

  I swung the pendulum gently, looking up into the old brass cogs as they started to turn. It wasn’t difficult for a Tech to work out what was wrong with it.

&nbs
p; “The escapement’s worn,” I said, after a tactful length of time. “If you bend the right side in a little… got a pair of pliers?” I squeezed gently, and the mechanism began to tick with a healthier beat.

  “It could do with replacing, really …” I added.

  I turned to find him regarding me narrowly. “What’s a Tech doing on the run?”

  “We’re not spies.”

  “I know that. They wouldn’t waste a good Tech on being a snooper. They wouldn’t want a Tech floating face down in the Ninety-foot Drain. We’m not fools, you know!”

  “They don’t need snoopers. Why’d you think I got you to dip the flypaper in the marmalade?”

  “I was going to ask that.”

  “Try opening it.”

  When he’d opened it, and I’d explained, he said very quietly, “I try to live peaceful. There’s one of these in every kitchen and every bedroom in the Fens. In our bedroom. …” He took a wooden stick, from a bundle that lay by the unlit fire, and bent it slowly, till it broke with a sharp, cracking sound. His face was very white.

  “You could tell everybody to dip them in treacle,” I said, faltering. Anything to take that look off his face.

  “What?” he said bitterly. “A quaint new Fenland custom? How long d’you think it’d be, before the inspectors traced it to us? We’ll let it be. What’ve you come here for, stirring things up?”

  “Just trying to get away. We’re sick of it.”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly. “I’ve seen what they’re doing to you. Not many Fenmen have. But we run live eels up to London in our old van. To Billingsgate, to feed the high and mighty. And a good price they do pay… I’ll try and help you. I suppose I owe you a favour … at least I can make love to my wife in private now. You like mechanical things? Come and see.”

  He led me through to a spotless front room. “Nobody but the vicar ever comes in here, apart from funerals. So…”

  I gasped. The walls were hung with a shining treasure hoard.

  “That’s a cavalry sabre of 1856—thrown away by some poor Fenman after the Crimea. An’ that’s a pike from King James’s time—handle’s new, though; I made it from a pitchfork. This musket—I faked the trigger guard from the element of an old electric kettle. Not bad, eh?”