‘And when it can’t get any worse?’
‘The killing will start.’ He said that so calmly, as if it were a future everybody knew about, that it became nearly believable. ‘Remember kangaroos, when the hunters used to shoot them to keep the numbers down? The cull, they called it. Then it came that there wasn’t enough feed for us and the kangaroos and they culled them right out. Just like that, some day we’ll cull ourselves – when there’s not enough feed. Your boys could see it happen.’
His sharp eyes brooded, but the cull was an aberration of his otherwise practical mind and we didn’t want to argue over some distant tomorrow. Minds wiser than ours paid no attention to future enormities; if you didn’t look, they would dwindle away. We did not know that other yet wiser minds had considered food, birthrate and poverty for three generations past and found only monstrous resolutions.
If we had known, what of it? We had enough to eat.
The period of inertia ended with a letter, Council of Advanced Education dramatically black on the envelope. Mum laid it on the table and Teddy was afraid to touch it; its contents could intoxicate or slay him. Finally he said, ‘I feel sick,’ picked it up and went outside.
Mum asked me in a very cool tone, ‘Do you know what being Extra means?’
‘You go to a Special School.’
She told me in the tight voice of somebody reading a set piece, ‘Extra is a Latin word, it means outside. An Extra has intelligence outside the ordinary.’ Her tone became desolate. ‘Teddy may be Extra.’
Teddy had never seemed all that clever. Smart-alecky, if that counted. But he kept so much to himself there was no knowing. I asked, ‘Would that make him Sweet again?’
I thought, too late, that Mum would snap, ‘We are not Swill, Francis,’ but she said only, ‘Yes, Sweet forever.’
An anger in me protested, ‘He can’t even do sums!’
She managed a laugh. ‘Doing sums isn’t very Extra. It’s a talent, not a – a superiority.’
Teddy came back with no expression at all on his face and said, ‘I passed. I’m Extra.’
After that neither Mum nor he knew what to say, until she asked, ‘When do you go?’
‘Next Monday.’ Teddy didn’t often make jokes but for once he tried. ‘It’ll save you ten dollars a week.’
She smiled as though that was a terrific thought (it would also lose her Teddy’s share of the Suss) and said she didn’t think Billy would mind. Then more silence.
Teddy broke it. ‘I’m going to put in for Police Intelligence Recruit School.’
Mum looked unbelieving but my egocentric innocence saw that a sort of super-copper could be a useful prop to the family fortunes. We could have ‘arrangements,’ like Billy’s.
There was a queer moment when Billy was told of Teddy’s Test result. We were all in the lounge-room, Teddy as usual refusing to acknowledge Billy’s presence, working on a puzzle supported on his knees. Mum told the news, hovering between pride in her son and superstitious fear for his fortunes in a profession none of us understood.
Billy repeated, ‘Police Intelligence . . .’ in a sort of affirming irony, and his role-playing could not supply warmth to his, ‘Congratulations, kid.’
Teddy looked up without speaking; his face blazed a contempt that words could only have diminished.
Billy nodded to the unspoken message and gave his answer: ‘You’re wrong, kid. I do matter. All the Swill matter. You’ll find out.’
Teddy left on the Monday without fuss. Mum was upset because he was going to dormitory school and would not be home at night, but he who had insisted on being the center of affection now wanted no demonstration; she would move to pat an invisible speck from his shoulder and he would avoid the touch. I knew what danced in his head that he dared not let her know: I am leaving this demeaning place.
The council’s hoverbus, with its Knowledge Is Power motto in bright scarlet across the bow, floated over the wrecked macadam to rest at our gate. Its door folded open. From the windows the young faces of the month’s intake considered Teddy, jealously appraising.
His stiff goodbye was almost a flight but he could not avoid Mum’s embrace and kiss. ‘Don’t forget to write.’
‘Of course not.’ But his eyes were on the bus.
‘And come home every chance you get.’ She remembered that in our other suburb proud Mrs Urquhart’s boy had visited often twice a month. ‘We’ll want to hear all about it.’
‘Of course.’ Briefly he returned her kiss and hurried into the bus. I might not have been there. As the machine lifted he waved but his sight was fixed on far places.
He did not write; he did not come.
Mum waited and did not complain; since Dad’s death she had worn armour whose joints rarely showed. She wrote to him – and again. Soon an official envelope came.
‘. . . psychological gulf between Edward Conway’s status training and his unfortunate family circumstances . . . social tensions implicit in his consciousness of Sustenance connections . . . proper balance to be maintained with new relationships . . . our reorientation demands on the child are severe and parental feeling should, in fairness to him, take second place . . .’
It must have seemed to her that in the name of love her life was being butchered.
I have to admit that Teddy’s absence did not depress me.
She showed the letter to Billy, having no other confidant. She spoke to none of the neighbours; they kept to themselves anyway, and the two scarecrows in the other half of the house hardly dared to address someone so friendly with Mr Kovacs. Billy’s influence was a mystery to us then, but real enough when it came to getting things done.
I heard only one remark from him about the letter: ‘Don’t cry over him. You’ve got one son in Sweet heaven, so your life hasn’t been wasted. And he isn’t stupid. In the end he’ll make up his own mind who he sees and who he doesn’t.’
Such tough comfort appeared to help her, if only in setting a goal of waiting.
Billy couldn’t help me when I asked how the Extras lived; the intellectual life was beyond his imagining but he had an opinion to offer when I wondered what the State wanted with them: ‘The superbrats? Insurance. So they’ll know who not to kill off. Heaven’s an exclusive place.’
My ears had conditioned themselves to close automatically when he got on to that raving cull stuff.
7
In the end it was Billy who badgered Mum about schooling for me, telling her in his gritty way that having an egghead in the family didn’t justify leaving the other one Swill-ignorant.
She could only ask, ‘But where?’
She should have known that Billy had settled that before he raised the subject. I imagine she had her ideas as to why he paid us such loving attention as he did, and deduced his motive as a patient courtship, but it was long-sighted opportunism that set him to furthering my education.
His complicated contacts had located a school in our Fringe area, a small privately run place catering for those lower-income Sweet who might easily be phased out of their shaky status but held on as though tomorrow might not come. When Mum asked about fees he was vague, saying he might be able to ‘swing an arrangement.’
The arrangement was, of course, already swung; he saw no need to explain to Mum that the goods – myself – had only to be produced for assessment.
On the day he took me to the school he was in Swill rig. He didn’t actually smell but he was unwashed and unshaven and his hair might have been combed with his fingers. In rumpled and greasy clothes he was better than the filthy spider of the first day but less than the novice gentleman he tried to be in our lounge-room. I saw with surprise that he was not really the menacingly tall man I accepted him as being but only a little above middle height, that his powerful presence was put on and off at need. The presence that day was rat-faced cunning; in a triv play I would have spotted him at once as con man and thief.
After all these years his personality still eludes me; all his pret
ences except the foredoomed gentility seemed real in the acting. Perhaps they were; some actors claim that the role ‘takes over.’
The school was some twenty minutes’ walk from home, on the edge of a proper Sweet suburb, a biggish two-story house with the wrought-iron balconies of another age. I could hear kids playing somewhere behind, out of sight.
My sense of propriety took fright when Swill-rigged Billy made for the front door and I suggested that we go around the back. He grinned his con-man’s grin. ‘Servants’ entrance, eh? But I’m not a servant, kid, I’m the boss. You’ll see.’ And he banged the shiny brass knocker.
The lady who opened the door was Sweet, thin and grey and prim, but under the primness was the beaten wariness I learned to recognise in the small Sweet as their hopes died. She said to Billy, with a decent woman’s disgust, ‘You might at least have washed. And you’re late. Mrs Parkes has been waiting ten minutes.’
‘Then she’s ten minutes older with bugger all to show for it. This is Francis Conway. Francis, this is Miss Pender, your headmistress. In you go, lad.’
Miss Pender led the way. I followed with new-boy shivers, but Billy’s big hand comforted while it urged me on.
In the office, by the windows, sat the woman who must be the waiting Mrs Parkes – hard-edged, middle-aged, cool-eyed with a no-nonsense sheen over all. Extra-Bitchy Sweet, I decided, which was unfair. She was in fact a sympathetic woman who happened to run a business, not quite honestly; she needed her professional hardness.
By her stood a man who had to be Very Big Sweet – assured, tailored like a jewel, soft-fleshed but nasty-tough under it. The woman surveyed me with casual interest. The man grunted, ‘Looks like any other brat.’
Billy, standing just inside the door, said, ‘That’s part of his value,’ in the rasping whine triv actors use to pretend Swill, but the man gave no sign that he heard. Some Sweet had begun to believe that Swill weren’t really people. Or perhaps he knew fake Swill when he heard it and wasn’t to be conned by game-playing.
Billy leaned against the wall where he could see all of us without seeming to be part of the meeting. He threw me a quick wink but Mrs Parkes saw it and made a moment’s study of him. Miss Pender seemed to have no function; she sat at her desk and listened.
Very Big Sweet came over and took me under the chin, turned my face up to suit him and said, ‘You figure in your head, eh?’ and did not wait for an answer before he accused, ‘And you think you’re really somebody, eh?’
With one question requiring yes and the other no, I was dumbstruck. He leaned down to me, smelling peculiarly of roses and aromatic leather, and hissed, ‘What’s 17 into 1,274, eh?’
Though he frightened me, this was too easy; my numerical reflex was shooting back at him before his mouth closed: ‘74.9411764705882352 all after the decimal point repeating.’
He controlled surprise, but I saw it. ‘Write it down.’ Miss Pender gave me a piece of paper and a stylus and I jotted it down while he checked it on his wrist cally and grudgingly admitted me right.
Billy said to the air, ‘Try something that’ll stretch ’im, Boss,’ and was ignored. (Billy could do arithmetic with pencil and paper, saying it was necessary for a Swill businessman; the Very Big Sweet probably could not.)
The Sweet read out two ten-digit figures to be multiplied together; he didn’t know enough to set a tricky sum. Mrs Parkes shook her head in mock amazement at the little boy bubbling his snappy answers but I knew she was not putting me down, particularly when she gave Billy a slight nod of approval, recognizing him as a real person with a part in what went on. When she smiled at me I wanted to please her, smiles had been rare since Dad died.
Then she spoke and the Very Big Sweet shut up and we saw who was boss. Except perhaps Billy, who always had his own ideas about who ran things.
She gave me sums of another kind. I guessed they dealt with goods and prices by the style and the long sequences to be collated in a single answer. The ability to remember and reach back was important, not the easy figuring. She had the answers ready and checked every step.
At the end she said, ‘It took me six hours to work those on paper.’ An obvious question jumped into my head but Billy stared hard at me and I shut my mouth. Mrs Parkes said I was very good, ‘Quite good enough.’ Then she asked, ‘Will you work for me for an hour every week?’
What had this to do with going to school? Not knowing what to say, I looked at Billy. His rat face fell into the gentlest smile I had ever seen on it as he told me, in that dreadful fake Swill accent, ‘You can say no if you don’t want to do it.’
He knew me better than that – I would have figured all night for a smile and a pat. Of course I said yes.
His smile twisted slightly as it faded back behind his mouth. I could not know that he was having uneasy second thoughts, last-moment uncertainties about his scheming, almost hoping that I would make up his mind by refusing a potentially dangerous game. I closed the door on escape with a word siphoned out of me by kindness.
‘That’s it,’ Billy said. ‘Now yers got ’im.’
Mrs Parkes spoke as if of ordinary things. ‘Please drop that unpleasant dialect, Mr Kovacs. The connections who found me for you told me all I need to know about you. And the unwashed touch was unnecessary.’ She smiled thinly. ‘But I appreciate thoroughness.’ Since he only gazed at her with blank eyes she had to prod him with a question: ‘Are you selling the boy’s brain or his soul or both?’
‘Neither.’ The sound of his normal voice took some of the playacting out of the air. ‘I never seen – saw – a soul and I don’t sell people. He is selling a bit of talent for an hour a week – while he still wants to.’
‘And you?’
‘I see fair play and fair pay. I know what he’s worth to you near enough to set a price.’
The Very Big Sweet broke in, ‘State’s sake, Nola, he’s just a Swill crim with a bumboy.’
Billy said explosively, ‘No!’ but Mrs Parkes paid no attention to either of them. She crooked her finger to bring me to her side, looked into my eyes and turned me to face Billy. ‘What is he to you, child?’
I had never thought about that; a child doesn’t think about what is. Grasping at an answer I said, ‘He’s my number two dad,’ which made her eyebrows rise and her lips twitch and brought a disgusted grunt from the Very Big Sweet. I saved the moral day by adding, ‘He looks after Mum and me,’ creating a safer but equally wrong impression.
‘Does he, now? That’s not for me to—’ She asked instead, ‘Do you love Mr Kovacs?’
‘Of course. He’s my number two—’
‘Yes, yes.’ Her eyes were on Billy. When I looked it was too late; he had put on his blank stare. But she laughed aloud. ‘Damned if you aren’t a doting second-string father after all!’
He growled at me as if I had betrayed him in some way, ‘Piss off outside, Francis. We’ve got business to talk.’
Miss Pender made her one ladylike contribution: ‘It might be best if I take Francis to his classroom,’ and bundled me out before the interesting part began.
When he picked me up after school, Billy would not say much. When I asked, ‘What will I have to do?’ he answered, ‘Be a schoolboy.’ His tone, usually so down-right, was unsure and I guessed there was something not straight about the arrangements. That gave them an attractive, romantic aura, like an adventure.
As for the school, I don’t think it amounted to anything scholastically but I stayed there for several years and learned nothing to do me any harm. It was outside school hours that fascinating affairs came into my life.
As we walked home that afternoon a light rain fell, what Mum would have called a Scotch mist. There was no shelter in the residential street but it wasn’t heavy enough to worry about. ‘It’ll get heavier,’ Billy said. ‘The river was up a bit this morning.’
There had been river-flood scenes on the triv the night before, with stranded cattle and people on rooftops with water up to the spouting, but th
at had been away somewhere in the country. Rejecting a connection of events, I said, ‘That wasn’t our river though.’
‘It was. Same one, further up.’
My mind slipped back to the birthday and Mum talking about Newport. Where the Swill would one day swim like mad. ‘Does the water come in at the ground floor?’
‘Sometimes. Where did you hear that?’
I explained and asked because the vision was unclear, ‘Isn’t there a wall?’
‘A bit of a one. They must have thought it was high enough. Or they wanted the money for something else.’
I asked, ‘Does it stink?’, which might have sounded irrelevant but Billy said, ‘When it goes down, the mud stinks. Like dirty shithouses.’
‘I’ve never seen the river. Is it big?’
‘I can’t tell, kid. I never saw any other one.’ He was saying that he had lived his whole life down there in the towers, seeing nothing else. He should have found a way out. Surely there was a way out.
That conversation might have taken an informative turn if he hadn’t grabbed my arm. ‘Listen!’
There was a distant, murmuring sound like a cat purring in its dreams. He said, ‘The bastard is up!’ He had me half running, half dragged, until we came to our street and the purr was a deep roaring at the bottom of the hill on the other side of the towers. ‘Is that the river?’ He nodded.
Now a wind rose from nowhere and heavier rain came down, cold and stinging; in seconds we were drenched. He pushed me through our gate. ‘Tell your mum I’ve got to get home.’
He was running, waving no as I shouted, ‘Come in and get dry,’ the soaked shirt and trousers sticking to his bones.
When I told Mum, she said that the river must be flooding and that he had his family to look after. Family was something he never talked about; he kept his affairs in separate boxes, one kind of life here, another there.
‘Where is the river?’
‘At the bottom of the street, more than a kilometer away.’
‘Can it come up to here?’
The Sea and Summer Page 7
