‘Is it, now? Do you still think, after all your history classes, that you can wipe away the past as a failure? We’re here, aren’t we? How did we manage it? We didn’t. Our stupid, dirty forefathers got us here.’
Again the pause and a small, dissatisfied sigh. ‘Perhaps I should do the speech over again, sir.’
‘No, we’ll erase the tape.’ I did so. ‘Your list of modern values praises quantity of activities with no mention of quality.’
‘Do you mean that people were happier then, that the past really was better?’
‘How would I know? I wasn’t there. The recent past may seem worse than today but the people living in it might not have agreed. It was different. People make the best of what they have and are happy or unhappy. Our fathers loved life and the world and left their records to testify to it.’
I caught the flicker that meant he was going to bowl me up a smart one. ‘What might the Swill think about that?’
Smart enough bat right into my hands. ‘You think they must be unhappy?’
‘Wretched.’ Wretched Swill was a cliché of the day.
‘That’s their physical condition compared with yours. It doesn’t describe their hearts, which aren’t wholly unhappy.’ His look of patient tolerance got under my skin. He knew Swill couldn’t possibly be happy like – like people. ‘You’ve never moved among them.’
‘How could I? But we’re told—’
‘—by those who haven’t moved among them either. There’s joy and laughter in the towers, even contentment. As much as among the Sweet, anyway, which isn’t too much.’
I wasn’t getting through. A central belief was being contradicted. He said with stonewall impudence, ‘I don’t think I understand.’
I snapped at him, ‘You’ll see for yourself one day.’
That was stupid of me and I would pay for it. It was far too early for such information, but now there could be no retreat.
‘Sir!’ That was rejection beyond mere refusal to understand.
‘I said you’ll see for yourself.’
‘Go among them! What would I want down there?’
Down there . . . ‘To do the job you have opted for. To gather intelligence.’
It was revenge for all the frustration he had given me. (Oh, delirious triv serials, where Intelligence operatives penetrate the Third World jungles, parachute into secret China behind portable jamming screens, creep across the ocean floor into the harbours of the Gulf States . . .) Among the Swill! That sort of job!
I should have been ashamed but was not. After eleven months of improvement he was still a pest of a kid.
He snorted, ‘What could you learn from them?’
‘If, perhaps, the present is better than the past.’ It was time to cut it short. ‘Goodnight, Teddy.’
He resisted dismissal. ‘But how – how?’
So the idea had made a small impact. ‘With difficulty at first. By becoming one of them in your mind. A job for an actor.’
He protested, ‘I can only act what I know. Swill aren’t like us. They’re—’ he saw disaster but his tongue was too far ahead to be halted, ‘—animals. I don’t know how to be an animal.’
He waited warily for the fire to fall but I said only, ‘Yes, you do. We all do. Think about it.’
A whole conditioned lifetime rebelled. ‘I’m not the Swill kind of animal – dirty, criminal, ignorant.’
He needed an unfair jolt, below the defenses. ‘Change the way you think about them. Like this: if the Extra Test had been introduced thirty years ago, it might be Billy Koyacs sitting here trying to teach you sense. His wasted brain is probably as good as yours.’
What should have been outrage emerged as sulky complaint. No matter what, you always come back to him.’
‘Just as one day you will.’
‘No!’ Explosive, furious.
‘Yes. Eventually. Goodnight, Teddy.’
‘I want to—’
‘Goodnight.’
His sudden calm was not capitulation. His shrug said, ‘I’ll get nowhere with this goon, while his look said, But it isn’t finished. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Sir.’
‘Sir!’
I was left alone with my mistakes. This conversation would be all through the squads by midnight and in a day or two I would surely be carpeted for jumping the curricular gun. So much for the cool intellect of the instructor, always on top of the exchange.
11
Teddy
AD 2045
Carol was at the sandpit; she always waited for me, practicing the flips and twists that were refining themselves into mathematical lines and whorls of grace. How had the waiting come about? Memory does not say; it had crept up on us as such things do.
I told her the whole interview. The one thing I shared with Francis was an actor’s talent (not after all so common among them, either) for verbatim recall. At the end I said outright that I didn’t believe him. ‘They wouldn’t waste Extras on Swill.’
Carol was less sure. ‘If Nick said it—’
No gainsaying that. What Nick said always turned out to be right. That was the one shining thing about Nick, that his most outrageous ideas made eventual sense; his resentable statements shook down into truths to be swallowed. She said pensively, ‘Perhaps not for all of us. I couldn’t go there, I couldn’t act it.’
Nor could she. She was a rotten actress, striking poses and using words as if meaning hadn’t been invented. And Nick hadn’t said everybody, he had said you, meaning me. ‘It could be only those who opted for PI.’
‘But that would mean me, too. And I couldn’t. It’s you because you’re a good actor.’
She had tapped into my vanity. The situation reversed itself and I saw my part as someone very useful, possessed of a special talent which allowed me to do what others could not. For a visionary moment I did what I had said I could not do and moved into the mind of the only Swill I knew anything about, stretching my snake’s body along the fence, chewing while I watched the foolish woman and her kids coming down in the world, calculating what could be screwed out of her, summing her up while my forked tongue selected a point of strike . . . I felt the dirty clothes and my unwashed lousiness, the skin stretched over my narrow face, the champ of my jaws and the thin, sharp soul looking out at prey
This was what Nick had promised me. The unacceptable glorified itself into need. I had been thrown the challenge to roll in muck and come up undefiled and I was the one who could do it. In his prodding, undercutting way he had promised me the most extreme use of a talent. I saw him for what he was, a shaker of minds until the crusted rubbish fell away and the cores were exposed.
That all this added up to an exercise in flattered vanity did not matter. From opponent Nick became my accomplice.
The alliance withered at birth. Some years passed before I so much as saw him again.
While I preened myself on self-discovery Carol spread my gossip around the tents where it was received with degrees of credence, disbelief, tolerant guffaws and outright fright, according to type. In the morning, when the squads assembled, it caused nervous questions to be asked of tutors. The questions caused a flurry of embarrassed, conflicting, time-serving replies which culminated in an unscheduled conference of tutors at midday. Then Nick was silently gone and a new senior in place. It was accepted that my wagging tongue had precipitated Nick’s downfall (the tutors spoke only of routine replacement) and I achieved among the squads a shortlived notoriety as a man to be wary of, a throneshaker not lightly to be crossed.
The tutors observed me with stone faces and pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
At the end of our year – bronzed, filling out, shooting up, bursting with health – we were transported back to Melbourne where we were broken up into our final training allocations. Carol and I, with a dozen others, were ushered into the Police Intelligence Recruit School, where our first and most unsettling shock was the discovery that we formed exactly half of our ca
dre.
The other half were Swill.
Our presence upset them as theirs demoralized us. We glared at each other across a barrier of social incredulity. Neither half realized, had been capable of realizing, that this was the climax of the long undermining of preconceptions.
One thing we Sweet discovered very soon was the reason for our twelve months of living hard: it had been to bring us up to physical scratch. Those Swill kids had been street fighters while we still played in kindergarten.
12
Alison
AD 2044–2047
1
I was educated, well-bred, socially competent. I was well-read, worldly wise, mentally balanced. I was a wife, a mother, a social success. I was safely middle class, safely married, safely ensconced. Safely safe, safe, safe.
My husband killed himself and overnight I was a nonentity, an indelicate presence without income or status expected to have the decency to slip quietly from sight. But I prided myself on courage and a practical mind. It was the courage of the cornered rat and the practicality of the tamed goat with no alternative but to accept its tether, but for a few days I played the heroine, tigress mother with cubs at her breast, competent handler of problems, indomitable facer of fortune fallen to ambiguous status but retaining Sweet pride and Sweet assuredness of right and wrong.
Billy took all that from me in half an hour. I faced up to him (so I thought of it) with tough acceptance of the inevitable, ceding what must be ceded so that my boys might live in safety and keep pride in themselves. In fact I surrendered every point because I didn’t dare do otherwise and worked up a fine mixture of hatred and contempt to shore up my role of suffering heroine.
He wanted me. I recognized that from the beginning and was fool enough to think it gave me power over him so long as I never let him take me. That was the idiot psychology absorbed from triv romances. It was not I who dangled him at cunning fingers’ ends but he who soothed me gently into my place in the society of the gutter, never moving closer until he was sure that I saw myself without distortion and saw him, too, as he was.
His patience was monastic. It was powered by love, the one impulse I did not credit in him; through two celibate years I knew he wanted to climb into my bed (among, I found, any number of other beds), never dreaming that he might want, need, more than that. I didn’t credit Swill with a capacity for love. Worse, I didn’t credit myself with the capacity for love of a Swill man. (One who already had a wife and family of twenty years’ standing!) When the caste nonsense collapsed I hardly noticed its going.
I have never fully understood Billy. Billy in love is thoughtful, kind, infinitely gentle, superior in strength and devoted in sharing them. Billy detected in weakness, deviousness or, most painfully, in loss of face through lack of education or social nous, is spiteful and childish. Billy away from those he loves is a two-faced schemer, a thief, a brawler, a stand-over man and – I am fairly sure of this – a killer. He is also the essential law in his agreed area of Newport Swilldom. I love him. Let that stand in lieu of total comprehension.
Is he a variant forged in the unique Swill fires or are there more like him, a contradictory breed thrown up by the pressures of a decaying culture?
Teddy’s desertion hurt bitterly, but he and I had seen each other clearly on the night when his father died. Also, I was still numbed by disaster, buffered against shock. Billy was bewildered, unable to understand that families can crumble as the myth of ‘natural affection’ is exposed; a Swill family is indivisible, a tribe, proof against internal hates and dissensions. Teddy confirmed his opinion of the Sweet as essentially self-serving. Not altogether wrong.
He said, ‘He’ll be back. He’s gone off all cocky to stand on his two feet against the world, but just wait till the world’s worked him over. He’ll be back.’
No. I could see him in solitary tears but not crawling home in defeat – he was too proud for that.
‘Fuck pride,’ said Billy. ‘It wears off or it gets knocked off. He’ll come home when he sees straight.’
Motherhood involves a lifetime of mixed self-deception and clear sight. I had no illusions about Francis as a selfish, deceitful child but my inner foolishness trusted his weakness to hold him at home where love and security lay. The fact penetrated only slowly that love and security lay in the gut of the Swill protector from whom I bought them for weekly dollars.
At first I saw his affection for Francis as an exploitable foible, a kitten softness at odds with his big cat menace. I sold Billy short in our early dealings. He was a blemish to be borne, a coarse servant cheaply paid at a few dollars, a discomfort but one that I could manipulate. There’s vanity! I convinced myself that I employed and directed a dangerous thug bound by unrequited sentiment to me and my son. Oh, I knew that Francis adored him, but schoolboy crushes wear off in time. (And so his did. He got over Billy and he got over me, too. But that was later.)
One adapts so easily. The years that began in terror and loneliness settled into a housewifely round of making ends meet. When we had relearned the pleasure of small amusements there were as many good times as bad. This came of Billy’s caring while my attitude toward him slid, almost unperceived, from angry disgust to reserved tolerance, to amused friendliness, to open dependence, to—
—To the night he ‘put the hard word on me.’ That was his blunt description of what he thought of as a declaration of love – I recall it with a twitch of the heart between exasperation and laughter. So he ‘put the hard word’ on me and I dissolved into the passion that had waited at my shoulder for the stirring of the senses.
Billy thought Francis disliked the arrangement; the boy said nothing but the bond between them loosened. So Billy said. I, schoolgirl-silly in my new adoration, did not care what Francis thought – he could forfeit a trifle of the comfort of his heart in favour of mine. After all, he had to grow up.
I wonder at my love for Billy, as if I were an observer amazed at my willingness to fall into the Swill embrace. A scrap of old aristocracy whispers, nostalgie de la boue. I accept that. I was happy.
That is enough of me. It is Billy I need to tell about.
He knew so much of what he called ‘the real world,’ meaning the towers, and so little outside them. He saw education as a desired tool but had little idea what it was or how to use it; he came unwillingly to understand that his magpie accumulation of facts was not an education. It was hard for a man in his forties to face the thought that much of his effort for himself and others was founded on muddled ideas. That he rose above anger and resentment and came to me for instruction is a measure of the man he might have been in a fairer time. (Swill men do not take instruction from their women; my position in his life was, to his observant peers, quirky and questionable.)
At first I used superior knowledge as a stick to beat his complacency – it’s a wonder he didn’t hit me, a greater wonder that his devotion survived the temptation. His grim self-control warned me in time that he suffered me because he needed knowledge as a – I nearly wrote, ‘as a flower needs the sun,’ but that won’t do for Billy – as a dog needs its dinner, in blind hunger.
Yet he knew and understood matters that had existed under my nose for years without my seeing them. As in the case of the newscasts.
The subject came up one night as he lay in my arms. Because he was absent so much on business that I preferred not to know about, most of our intimate talk took place in bed, where this dominant male liked to be nursed. A psychologist might make something of that.
This was a night in the aftermath of a storm tide that had pushed the river back for miles. The lower streets had been submerged for a full day of dangerous undertows and conflicting currents, and the Tower Bosses had been worked to their limits through forty hours of organization and rescue. The very young and the very old were a heavy responsibility in flood time.
As always when his body and mind had been tested beyond decent endurance there was a running-down period before sleep, as though he need
ed equilibrium before resting. He talked of split-second rescues and disgraceful desertions, of rigging rafts out of unlikely salvage, of a baby afloat in a caulked crate and a distraught grandmother stumbling and squawking after it with little concern for the child but a great and noisy terror of the father who would thrash the skin off her for carelessness.
At some point he said, ‘But we’re better off than the Gold Coasters up north. They have cyclones, great whirling bastards that can split a tower. Kill hundreds at a time.’
‘Not any more,’ I told him.
He twisted his head to look up at me. ‘How so?’
‘The weather control people found out how to make cyclones wind down before they reach full strength.’
‘When was that?’
‘Oh, years ago. I remember reading about it. Taming them increased interference with rainfall and weather fronts but it was the lesser evil.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course. Do you think it couldn’t be true?’
With his cheek back on my breast he said you could never be sure with those bastards who made the news and then unmade it to suit. ‘Like the bushfires. When do you see triv news about bushfires? About whole farms wiped out and country centers burned – and those are Swill centers mostly. When did you last see that? And when will you see today’s flood on the triv, telling how many were drowned and how many lost every bloody thing they owned because there’s no rescue service any longer? Or how we set broken bones in the tower corridors when the State meds can’t cope? You won’t.’
I thought with a disturbed wonderment that all this was true. In the Lucky Country we had no disasters. None, that is, in public. We had incidents, bushfires that were ‘contained,’ torrents that ‘subsided,’ droughts whose effects were ‘minimized.’ Other continents existed in permanent catastrophe, stalked by calamity, starvation and death as ruined ecologies reeled under the patternless weather conditions that drowned and buried at seasonless random. The northern hemisphere, we were told, suffered more than the southern. That had always been true, the palaeontologists said. In the southern hemisphere we remained the Lucky Country.
The Sea and Summer Page 16
