The clerk, an uninteresting little born bootlicker, said, ‘A Fringe boy can strike it lucky, eh?’
I hadn’t realized that all of them knew where I came from and I snapped back at him, fast, ‘The Fringe boy wasn’t lucky. He made his opportunity.’
He clasped hands in mock admiration and whinnied, ‘My, but we will get on in the world, won’t we?’ and hurried off to tell his section about the uppity new kid. It was a poor start but I didn’t care; I had blessings to count.
. . . The beginning of a life of my own making . . . an ambience of intelligence and sane living . . . an education I could not have obtained as a Fringe boy unable to afford it (actually, unable to reveal the existence of the means to afford it) . . . a kindly Ma’am and a simple cover job . . . luxury, position, protection in return for a few hours of service a week . . .
I was mistaken. For the next three years I worked like a driven horse.
The ‘cover job’ was real. I spent four hours a day in the warehouse, learning the logistics of government supply while a secretive part of my brain put together an infinity of two-and-twos to discover just how the Ma’am operated her network of subtraction and accountability. I spent six hours a day in school, in special tutorial classes set up by the Ma’am for her own children and a selected few of the junior Staff. It was there that I met Lottie Parkes, only a few months younger than myself. But more of her in its proper place. I had also to keep my room spotless and take my turn at rostered duties in Quarters, like cleaning the community rooms.
I worked a twelve-hour day before I called a moment my own and the first week brought me close to tears, but in time the pace became a practicable routine and the days as manageable as though my life had been spent in commerce. At the end of that first week, though, I could not get home fast enough for two days of lounging and lazing.
Mum and Billy found my woebegone account matter for laughter and talked about ‘facing realities’ until I could have spat in their silly faces. Their insensitivity glorified my nest of privacy in Quarters. When I left on the Sunday night I took a few private things with me, not enough to arouse suspicion, enough to prove to myself that I was cutting loose from the empty past.
On the following weekend I took a few more.
On the fifth weekend I stayed in Quarters. The break was made.
Many Staff had no homes outside Quarters, so meals were served as on other days; I would lose nothing by not going home. Mrs Parkes would not approve, but she rarely came near Staff Wing of a weekend. She would find out eventually but with luck this need not happen until the separation had established itself. I need only behave quietly.
The luck ran out immediately.
Lottie, of all people, spotted me. I had not known that she was in training to succeed her mother and that one of her apprentice jobs was to monitor the kitchen stores and weekend catering. She saw me at Saturday breakfast but paid no attention, so I thought no more of it then.
Lottie at fifteen was in her chrysalis stage – too fat, a little owlish and serious, playing strenuous games in hope of achieving the figure which later fell into neatness of itself – but she was nobody’s fool. She was a rapid learner, had her own bright talent for music and was not impressed by my arithmetical acrobatics, but we got on well together in class – it’s possible that the ma’am had told her to make me feel at home.
I felt at home without anybody’s help, but Lottie was a comfortable sort of girl and we chatted in class breaks, but socially we were rungs apart, so it surprised me later that morning to answer a knock on my door and find her on the threshold. She asked without preamble, ‘Does Mother know you’re here? You aren’t listed.’
That was a body blow. I shook my head uneasily.
Lottie said, ‘She’ll be furious when she finds out.’
I knew that, but asked, ‘Why should she?’
‘Because she promised that man you would go home at weekends.’
She did not move to come in and I was too shaken for the courtesies. ‘What man?’
‘I think he’s a Swill.’ She smiled like someone with a secret. ‘Don’t tell Mother, but I think he’s nice. In a rough sort of way.’ (Good God!) ‘I didn’t think Swill were like that.’
‘They aren’t,’ I told her, ‘and neither is he. And look, I won’t tell the Ma’am if you don’t say I’m here.’
That wasn’t any sort of a bargain on her side but, still half girl and half woman, she liked the idea of small intrigue. She said, ‘Secrets!’ with a finger on her lip, and went away.
She told, of course. Not right away but fairly soon.
The Ma’am sent for me one Monday morning. ‘You did not go home at the weekend.’
‘No, ma’am,’ telling myself unhappily that I was not frightened.
‘Or for the three previous weekends.’
‘No, ma’am.’ Timidly. I dared not be brazen with her.
‘Why not?’
With a sensation of stepping off a cliff I gathered my little courage for the fall. ‘I didn’t want to, ma’am. I don’t want to go there again, ever.’
She surveyed me in the strangest fashion, not as if I had done something wrong but as if she was seeing her handiwork and blaming herself, and to herself rather than to me she said, ‘Nothing to be gained by forcing you.’ Then she asked, ‘Are you happy here?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ I meant it. I was half silly with happiness because she was not about to crush me.
She fiddled with the things on her desk, making idle patterns, then sighed and said, ‘Go back to your work.’
I was at the door when she spoke again. ‘You are throwing away love. Do you know what that means?’
I could risk boldness. ‘No, ma’am. There is no love there.’
‘Do you think that?’ I was wary of a faint distaste in her tone, but all she said was, ‘You lack gratitude.’
‘No, ma’am, I don’t lack.’ I had to make some sort of a stand. ‘But do I have to be grateful forever while the chances pass me by?’
She seemed to look at me without seeing me while her thought went out and around and back again. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it is best that you remain here, where I can see you. So that you do not make silly mistakes.’
She looked down at her desk. It was dismissal.
In later, cooler mood, I had second thoughts about her last remark. The scene could not be replayed or altered; it was a warning against something that eluded me.
Lottie came to see me. She had been crying. ‘I didn’t mean to tell. I didn’t, Francis, but she knew anyway and that man was here.’
If he had wanted me back he hadn’t got me. Why should he want me? Mum nagging him?
Well, it was done with and Lottie was getting ready to cry again over her hapless treachery. She needed comfort and I was in giving mood. Besides, I liked her and her charm was beginning to flower.
THE AUTUMN PEOPLE
2
Andra woke early, which in his life’s experience meant that his mind was busy and telling him to get on with the pursuit of its obsession; sleep would come when necessary, when exhaustion dropped him into it.
He had left the curtains wide and from the bed he could see a square of sky, morning-grey with as yet only a promise of blue, flecked with wisps of cloud whose eastern edges were scarcely tinted pink. The colours warmed and deepened as he watched.
In the grey half-dark of his room he fashioned his obsession, the armature on which the theme of his play would be built. Its shape was a man lounging in a dark corner, chewing slowly, grinning familiarly, defying completion. Andra stripped the clothes from him, striving to see the body, to discover what muscle could be plated on to bones covered with a minimum of fat, to observe the resultant cording of surface veins, to manipulate the stance, holding spine and pelvis in pivot and balance for swift and easy movement. Sure now of how the man moved and stood, he built the clothes back on to the frame, observing how they fell and creased and fitted.
The
face was difficult. Ratface! The nose insisted on too much elongation and tended to wrinkle at him, snuffling over too-sharp teeth. A difficult visualization.
Entrancement was broken as the wall screen shrilled for his attention. He sat up, swearing damnation as his mind-figure vanished, and scrabbled for the remote control to shut off the noise, refusing the call. It began again at once with Lenna’s voice overriding the signal, ‘Don’t shut off, Andra. Please answer me.’
He yelled at the screen, ‘Do you always get up in the small hours?’
‘It is after seven. I thought that—’
So it was, and full daylight, the room bright with early sun; time had raced by while he built a man out of shadows.
‘Yes, yes, it’s all right. I was working.’
‘I’m sorry I interrupted you.’
He said pettishly, needing a small dart, ‘So am I. What can I do for you?’ and was glad she had not opted for visual. And what did she look like at this hour, before the day’s disguise was dabbed and patted into place? Like a self-possessed tutor, of course; only handsome actors looked like destiny’s bad joke at sunrise.
She said, with a hint of placation, not quite all tutor, ‘You could breakfast with me. You may have questions.’
‘Plenty of those, but I had thought of a meeting later on.’
‘Not before tonight, I’m afraid. I have my regular lecture and tutorials as well as administrative duties. After today I will not be so busy.’
She was saying, without undue emphasis, that she was prepared to give her time now and he could like it or leave it. An accustomed autocrat, he submitted unwillingly, reaching for a shred of histrionic charm to grace his voice. ‘That’s kind of you. Please forgive my abruptness. I’m usually a late riser and not at my best at sparrowcrack.’
‘Who is? In half an hour, then?’
‘Yes.’
He heard her take a breath before she asked with a return of the timidity that afflicted her as an author of fiction, ‘How much did you read?’
‘Part one, to the point where that beastly child cut the ties with his home.’ She would expect more, something heartening. ‘Strange. Interesting. Evocative.’ That should be enough to hold her for half an hour.
‘Ah.’ The screen switched off with a discreet hiccup. In the corner Kovacs flickered briefly to cover his mouth with bony fingers, aping the gentility he could not command. That would require work not to raise laughs in the wrong places.
He keyed for outside temperature – 9 degrees, fairly average for early morning in these cooling, weakening summers; 22 later, the forecast promised. Jacket and heavy trousers, he decided.
With a quarter of an hour to spare he took a turn around the lawns and found his memory assaulted by the morning scents of shrubs and flowers and cleansed air. He was rarely up so early, certainly never outside so soon; the fresh world was a return to childhood.
This southern edge of the campus was served by the South Hill Escalator that ran 400 meters down to the river bank. The drop provided a huge vista of the city far below, patches of bright fog still snug in its hollows, and beyond it the islands in the intricate delta of the Yarra, and beyond again, the sparkle of blue-green sea and a soft white line of horizon mist.
A solitary figure on the rising section of the Escalator grew improbably into Marin, dressed only in shorts and a thin shirt as though temperature were the concern of lesser breeds – non-Christians, for instance. Andra, preparing to rein his temper and treat insolence with suave good humour, was greeted by a breezy boy (would he be nineteen? twenty?) who wanted to show him around the campus and was disappointed at unwillingness.
‘Perhaps after breakfast, Marin. I don’t rouse much enthusiasm on an empty stomach.’
‘You won’t rouse much on the Scholar’s breakfast. Coffee and a crust! We could go to the Communal afterward and eat properly.’
Surprised, Andra asked, ‘Are you also breakfasting with Miss Wilson?’
‘Yes, she buzzed me to come up. She had a suggestion that should interest you.’ He took Andra’s arm familiarly while preserving protocol address (strange boy!). ‘Look across there, Artist.’
He pointed out over the New City, over the islands to a hump still dim in the morning, some twenty to thirty kilometers away. ‘That’s the only Enclave that was sited high enough never to have been flooded. It’s cut down and broken by storms and erosion – and probably by hasty building practices – but the ground floors are more or less intact with their internal divisions. So are the promenade skirts. You can actually walk the street between the towers.’
Some enthusiasm there. From the corner of his eye Andra sought and found a genuine glint in the boy’s expression.
Said Marin, ‘The Scholar suggests that we visit them this morning. Or in the afternoon, if that suits better. She feels that you should see them.’
‘Then I suppose I must.’ And what of his needs, his routines, his habits of work? She would say, with tutorial smile: all in good time, Andra; now, first you must – But he had begged the grant, hadn’t he? ‘This afternoon,’ trying not to sound driven and mutinous.
‘Straight after lunch? One o’clock, say? At the boat? It will be worth it. There are sections in the book where it helps to have the reality in mind.’
‘In the book?’
‘The novel. She said you had begun it last night.’
‘She did?’
‘That’s why she called me for breakfast.’
‘I see.’ He saw nothing at all but thought the sense would appear in time. ‘Have you also read it?’
‘Of course.’
Of course! ‘How did it impress you?’
‘I am not a judge of literature, Artist.’
What luck that Christianity had little to say about literary criticism. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
Marin’s boyishness deserted him in favour of the moralist. ‘It pleads for a lenient view of the Greenhouse people, yet scarcely an action in the story is less than venal.’
‘Ah.’
‘But it holds the attention. It is a weakness of the flesh that—’ a change of tone heralded a thumping piece of moral pronouncement, ‘—that one is fascinated by the contemplation of wickedness.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Prudently he refrained from suggesting that acquaintance closer than contemplation had its attraction but asked, carefully because unsure what might cause the boy’s prickles to appear, ‘Am I permitted to ask why Miss Wilson gave you her book to read?’
It seemed not to be an intrusion. ‘I think she wanted to broaden my mind, as the saying is.’ He swept an arm to gather in all the Old and New Cities. ‘She wants me to see these from various viewpoints. She once described Christianity as too narrow a slit through which to watch the world.’
‘I would agree.’
‘I suppose that professionally you must. Your profession, Artist, mirrors the world but does not explain it.’
Andra suppressed an impulse to hit him, while admitting privately that an encounter would most likely leave him bruised and bloody; the Christians had never been a peaceful brood. Hadn’t their founder caused a riot in a temple, wielding a scourge? And brought ‘not peace but a sword?’ (A good line, that.)
‘She also said,’ the boy continued, ‘that to understand evil it is necessary to see it through the eyes of the evil-doer. In some part her book is an attempt to do that. It is very instructive.’
Andra considered this ground altogether too treacherous. ‘It is time we went to breakfast.’
Breakfast for Lenna was truly coffee and a crust – well, toast spread with some kind of sugarless, diet-conscious viscosity – but for her guests there were eggs and stewed fruit and containers of salt and sugar, which she did not touch.
Andra could not forbear remarking that Marin did not offer a grace.
‘How could you know, Artist? Noisy prayer is not a badge of virtue.’
Serves me right. Stick to what you know, Andra.
‘My tim
e is limited,’ Lenna said. ‘Would you have urgent questions, Andra?’
‘Several dozen that can wait on developments, one that I would like to settle before continuing. The total cleavage between Sweet and Swill puzzles me.’
‘It was never total, as you will see in later chapters.’
‘There was the Fringe, but that seems to have been something of a buffer zone.’
‘It was exactly that, designedly. Each Enclave was surrounded by a Fringe zone and a ring of open parkland, and each Enclave had a strong military post in its heart.’
‘So it was a tyranny?’
Marin suggested, ‘A master-man relationship? Keeping the Swill in their places and letting them know it? It was not quite so.’
Lenna turned on him her wholly tutorial aspect. ‘If you have perceived that much—’
The boy said with a touch of wariness, ‘I have done some ancillary reading also.’
‘Then tell me what you have understood.’
Marin chewed pensively as he sought an entry into complications. ‘The idea was not oppression but preservation. The Sweet, educated and by and large the most competent sector of the population – with the usual leaven of time-servers – were necessary to administer the State. With the collapse of trade and all but essential industry the Swill became a burden on the economy, easier and cheaper to support if it were concentrated into small areas.’
Andra asked, ‘Are you saying that they built the Enclaves and herded the unemployed into them?’
‘No, no. It happened almost by accident. Sweeping changes always seem to arise without planning – taking advantage of them comes later. By the turn of the millennium the employment position was so bad that governments everywhere were forced to build high-rise apartments to accommodate the people supported by the State. They knew high-rise was socially a poor answer; the previous half-century had proved that, but with two-thirds of the people on pension or dole the financial situation was desperate. With populations rising, the people could not be spread over the countryside. Productive land had to produce, and Australia had never been a fertile country. So the Enclaves grew. By the end of the second decade they had become recognized as a mode of existence and the State organized itself around what had become a fact of living.’
The Sea and Summer Page 11
