The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  It was the first time I had heard her name, Vi – Violet. For that mountainous woman! It was unfair of fate. ‘I thought it might be she. She must hate me.’

  ‘Why?’ He did not lift his face to ask. He was simply curious.

  ‘Any woman would.’

  ‘That so?’ He was ruminating, not making fun of me. ‘She does all right. Gets everything she wants – well, just about. She’s got position and a family. Why should she care?’

  Were things done so differently in the towers? Or was he totally insensitive? No, he was not that. Whatever he was, I had no intention of surrendering him to a wife. His view of morality became more intelligible: it is something you practice when you can afford it, and I could not afford morality.

  She did care. She invaded the house one day in a murderous rage and I had no courage to face her. Billy arrived – my shabby white knight – while she raved and I cringed and he manhandled her out of the place. I wish I could forget my cowardice. Guilt does that to you.

  Perhaps I represented her last outcry against what time and uncontrollable glands had done to her, for everything I heard of her thereafter showed her as intelligent and very self-contained.

  Then Francis went away with a lie on his lips and did not come back. Billy tried to comfort me. Poor, clumsy Billy, He was not often clumsy but he had given love to Francis and knew that comfort was not possible. An unsuspected rejection can be devastating and degrading.

  I wept for my failure as a mother. In time I ceased to care. That isn’t true: caring does not cease, only drops to the rubbish heap of the subconscious, and rots and festers.

  5

  ‘Winter’ had become a name for a few weeks of the year when one perspired from effort rather than from humidity and the crowds in NE4 smelled – not sweeter, nothing could achieve that – less powerfully. As the global temperature crawled upward a fraction of a degree each year, our once temperate and now subtropical State fluctuated between extremes of drought and torrential flood. The farms were ruined by both.

  The Swill measured disaster by the food deliveries. Sudden dearth of cereal or occasional mild glut of potato, vanishing of sugar for a month or so, midsummer rationing of milk or – most infuriating of all – trial runs of staple-substitutes which neither substituted nor in any way appealed.

  ‘Winter’ meant warm downpours drowning the State as though a stuffed atmosphere had discharged an overloaded gut. On the tower skirts children danced in it while their elders muttered knowingly about the Greenhouse as though the word equalled understanding. Then the river would rise and a surge of filthy water overflow its banks. When there were ocean storms, river and tide would battle it out in the streets and the ground-floor apartments. I would recall my blue sea of delight in summers of glory – recall it with, occasionally, a useless tear.

  One night, after both my sons were gone and Billy was off on some unmentioned and perhaps unmentionable business, I slept alone while the rain drummed and the wind howled in my dreams, though the dreams were of bright yellow sand like a strip of gold under a smiling sun and a small girl in a scrap of costume, ecstatic in the lapping shallows.

  At some hour of the night the sea came up out of the delta to lap at my doorstep, but my windblown dream knew nothing of that. It had never before risen so high, even in beleaguered Newport.

  In the morning I noted that the rain had ceased and the sun shone, made myself a cup of Mrs Parkes’ tea and sat drinking it, half concerned because Billy had not come home, half enjoying myself not bustling to make his breakfast. From the wall the news bulletin chattered about the confluence of an unusually high tide driven by gale winds and a flash flood powered by cloudbursts over the Baw Baw Mountains. The ground floors of the towers, I thought, would be stinking messes of mud and rubbish with the unfortunate salvaging what they could in this fresh access of their recurrent misery. Some of them would be people I now knew slightly. They would not be swimming like mad (which of the boys had had that obscene fantasy?), only drearily rebuilding their lives after the tenth or dozenth inundation.

  The front door rattled and slammed and Billy came in, dishevelled and filthy, hair in rat tails, clothes crumpled and torn, trousers rolled to the knees, shoes jammed under his belt and splayed, bony feet caked with black mud that dripped on my clean floor. He was white with fatigue, close to exhaustion.

  He fell on to a chair, not speaking, and I gave him tea, holding the cup to his mouth, then wiped and dried his muddy feet and legs. When he spoke it was to ask, ‘House all right?’ and he closed his eyes when I nodded. It was hard work stripping him, harder still getting him to the bedroom and on to the bed. When I asked, ‘Are you hurt anywhere?’ he shook his head: ‘Tired.’

  I thought he slept immediately but he roused himself to ask, ‘Store day, in’t?’

  Of all things to think of! ‘Yes.’

  Nearly asleep, he lapsed into Swill dialect but I understood that NE4 was washed out, there were no stores to be had. In a house backed by Mrs Parkes that was no great tragedy but for thousands who calculated each week down to the last meal . . .

  Wondering what he had done all night in the flood water, my inexperience imagined only sentimentalities of small children rescued from drowning and old people helped to higher floors, not the organizing and slogging that had driven him to the end of his stamina. The mud on my clean floor roused a flash of annoyance that he had not wiped his feet at the door.

  At the front door I saw why. In the night the water had stalked into my ambitious, inexpert little garden and trampled pansies and carnations and marigolds under black mud. Mud covered the low boards of the veranda and soaked the strip of doormat; rising another centimeter it would have been over the threshold and down the passage. The water had never threatened my home before. I thought that I would never feel safe again.

  But flash floods drain away as fast as they rise and the enemy was already in retreat. I trudged through mud to the street corner to see the receding lip not twenty meters distant. The gentle slope of the road had sunk beneath a brown lake, sparkling in the promise of a cloudless day. Houses only a few doors from ours, only a few centimeters lower on the slope, had suffered a sewerlike flushing across their floors; lower still, tide-marks were at the window sills.

  I splashed into half a meter of dirty water, horrified by small gardens ruined, fences broken, dwellers puttering hopelessly at the degradation of the almost nothing which was all they had. Where the towers rose to the bright sun entire floors must be submerged while the water ebbed, leaving its patterns on walls and ceilings.

  The narrow-faced boy from the store appeared before me, saying carefully, like one practising a foreign language, ‘Don’t go down there, missus, you can’t do nothing.’ He gave up the struggle and reverted to familiar speech: ‘S’me Dad orri’?’ Something like that – spelling is helpless against it.

  ‘Yes, he’s asleep.’

  He nodded, ‘Fucked art, ’e wis,’ and gave me an earnest instruction (probably from his mother) which I could only translate by association and guesswork. I said, ‘Of course I’ll look after him,’ and seemed to have got it right because he gave his father’s grin and splashed back downhill to join a companion on a raft of empty steel drums and push off, giving me the cheeky ‘up yours’ sign which had enraged me until I realized it was the regular time-of-day greeting in the towers.

  I thought of him telling Vi that the Fringer woman was looking after Dad so not to worry, and I stood knee deep like a fool in the water, puzzling at the implied acceptance of things as they are, I don’t know how long I stood there, cold in the warm sunlight, obsessed by my ignorance of the world of endless disaster.

  A whining voice at the back of my mind insisted that while the greedy ocean rose, year by year, the real catastrophe was yet to come. Behind that again was the cowardly whisper of humanity in all ages, ‘Please, not in my time.’

  13

  Teddy

  AD 2045–2047

  1

>   To say that Sweet and Swill learned to understand each other would be fiddling the truth. We learned to mix without friction, but though real friendship, even a love affair or two, did straddle the social barricades, they were exceptions.

  Tutorial insistence that the Swill component lean to speak correct English, be able to pass as Sweet in voice and mien, offended them: they didn’t see it as an improvement and only under pressure become bilingual. (That, as it turned out, was enough to start undermining their class loyalties.)

  Hardest done by the social sense were we Fringers, seen by Swill as fake Sweet and by Sweet as Swill tainted. Stuck in the middle, looking both up and down, we realized earlier than the rest how deliberately the State fostered such attitudes. (That the State’s intention was not to create division so much as to preserve an economically manageable status quo was a sophistication beyond our perception just then.)

  Through all this Nick persisted under the surface of my mind, unhated. With the illogical crush-proneness of the teen years I now badly missed the hand that might have thrashed me but never did. A bad attack of father substitution.

  Other teen troubles surfaced. Carol and I were fourteen when she taught me those facts of life I had known only in sniggering theory; I had sense enough, or developing self-respect enough, not to ask where she learned them. Then for a year she indulged a bitching-martinet complex, grindingly perfect in drills and regulations. She tells me I withdrew into role-playing to a point where people avoided me in their uncertainty as to who I might be at a given moment – I was unaware of it myself. We both survived our periods of ego boosting, were still together when they passed and rolling happily in the hay whenever privacy could be got.

  Once or twice she tried to talk me into visiting home and we came close to quarrelling. She learned to leave the subject alone and I learned guilt as lengthening years made it ever more impossible for me to heal the break. ‘Mum, I’ve come home.’ ‘Why? Is there something you forgot to take with you?’ I couldn’t face it.

  I heard that Kovacs had moved in with Mum; it seemed impossible, degrading. I know now that the information was fed to me and that Nick was in his shadowy way behind the feeding. It made a solid reason for accusing her of betrayal (of whom? of me?) and hardening my heart. Hearts being what they are, mine only cursed and grieved.

  Word filtered through, too, of what Francis did for a living; presented to me in a manner that glossed over its criminal aspects, it seemed satisfactorily menial.

  If the camp had troubled our teenage certainties, the Intelligence School destroyed them. There we had our noses rubbed in those facts that everybody knows but, as they are other people’s woes, leave unattended – such as, that two-thirds of the world starves although it is easily possible with global planning, to feed everybody.

  We had never set such remote facts straight in our minds. Why should we? If raised as Sweet, we had been buttressed from birth against horrors, our minds parentally turned from the abyss. If reared as Swill, taught from birth that you could have your State-given share (a frugal but scientifically calculated ration) and no more, that life meant making the most of little, that there was no way out of the Swill towers (untrue) and that the preservation of the State depended on recognizing one’s place and not rocking the boat, why should they consider remote others?

  We learned, in wonderment at the obvious, that the State not only encouraged these counsels of contentment but actively promulgated them. The brighter history students observed with prim surprise that both Church and State had preached this doctrine of ordained place in the scheme of things as little as two centuries ago. Our world had taken a step backward. I heard chuckling Nick query again the meaning of ‘progress.’

  The upshot was outrage in squad tutorial. The tutor of the day listened, curbing extravagant protest here and there but in the main agreeing with us. He sat there agreeing that a monstrous State kept order by lies and cozenage! His acquiescence shut us up faster than any whipcrack of authority, until a single voice was left, crying, ‘But—’ and sinking into general silence.

  ‘But—’ Larry repeated. He was a seconded policeman who treated us with genial tolerance and bouts of histrionic despair. ‘But what, you outraged political nitwits? What would you do about it?’

  What would we not! The air boiled with Utopias and means of confounding the State’s philosophic errors. At the end Larry said, ‘This uprush of well-meant poppycock takes place every year at this point in the syllabus. You are neither better nor worse than most, only noisier.’

  He sat on a corner of his desk, swinging a leg and giving us the raised eyebrow that meant disillusionment coming apace. ‘You will each prepare a scheme for the solution of the planetary food problem. If you feel that weather fluctuation will be the main problem, to be countered by improved meteorology, small weather-control units and better farm administration, be advised that it will not. Your concerns will be salination, education, finance, transport, religion, global politics and selfishness. For research I recommend the Governmental Procedures and Year Books of the major nations. You have surprises coming to you. Dismiss.’

  As we left he had an afterthought: ‘If at the end of a week anyone should despair of completing this exercise, we will weep together but no marks will be lost. That does not absolve you from trying.’

  We floundered in deeper mud than ideals had dreamed of. In the end none of us completed the task; what we found in those recommended texts frightened the nonsense out of us. Police Intelligence had a major victory over social conditioning. We began blunderingly to think.

  Larry believed that when ignorance had talked itself out there was room for information to enter, so the population problem followed obviously enough from the food problem. On the next day, in fact.

  The squad agreed that it was, basically, one for national governments. When you have been born into a system referred to as the Concerned State, one that takes responsibility for everything, your response is to leave everything to it. Childbirth affects everyone, so the State should—

  Should what?

  Larry outlined the attempts that had been made in the past: reversible and non-reversible sterilization, decrees limiting family size, selective allocation of the right to breed, savage punishment for illegal conception, exhortation by charismatic leaders and such grotesque aberrations as segregation of the sexes and encouragement of homosexual relationships.

  The last two we saw clearly as denials of heterosexual genetics. ‘Not the others?’ Larry asked. Well, yes, the others too . . . but some sort of restraint was necessary . . . ‘Applied by whom?’ Well, um, the prospective breeders. Contraception was, after all, freely available.

  ‘A very respectable moral attitude for a class whose combined sexual depth wouldn’t raise a breeze in a brothel doorway. What of the consequences of parenthood denied?’

  We knew of those at second hand, through reading. Assessed over three generations of trial by every major nation, they were breakdown of the family unit, increases in street and domestic violence, apathy, mental depression, withdrawal from responsibility and – most seriously from a State viewpoint – unrest expressing itself in destruction of property, political dissension and outright insurrection.

  ‘Take away the core of sexual existence, procreation, and emotional energy seeks an outlet. The alternative to creation is destruction. People want children.’

  Sixteen is a productive age of cynicism, so it was no surprise that a voice said, ‘The poor do.’

  That was a kid we called Young Arry because he chose to answer to it rather than resent it as a reflection on his Swill origin; a thin skin would have started more fights than any gutter battler could survive. Besides, he was skinny and clumsy and not much good for anything but physics and distance running. I liked him in a casual way, almost against my will, but well enough to take his part when he needed support and not take it amiss when he failed to thank me for it. I suppose the dregs of vanity still showed in me, because he
was the only Swill kid who would meet me halfway.

  The Sweet kids in the squad didn’t argue his point about the poor because Arry was the poor, while the Swill knew exactly what he meant. History backed his statement: poverty had always been a saddling paddock, and at the heart of our present problems were the swarming, unproductive poor.

  Larry didn’t give a damn for Sweet or Swill or the feelings of either. ‘True,’ he said, ‘but why?’

  ‘Habit,’ said Arry, a laconic type.

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Lose it and you become an endangered species.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘You need a hobby when you’ve got a lot of spare time.’

  Larry spoiled our tittering by saying, ‘That is literally true. A feature of idle poverty is a failure to develop inner resources. The poor need entertainment that costs nothing.’ To the ripple of subdued catcalls he added, ‘If you have to pay for it you don’t deserve it.’

  That set the girls squawking denunciation of prodding males treating them as sex objects.

  ‘You mean you should be paid for it? Good for you, but tell me, what do you treat males as?’

  Eh? Oh, as companions, prospective life partners. ‘And sometimes,’ said Carol, whose sense of humour played no favourites, ‘as sex objects.’

  ‘Only sometimes?’

  She refused to be drawn; further gender treachery would get her a season in hell from the other girls. As things quietened down somebody asked what should have been asked earlier, ‘But why does contraceptive teaching fail?’

  Larry set his face in the bland innocence of the liar who refuses to be queried. ‘I’m sure I don’t know. It should make an interesting investigation. Let me have your ideas a week from today.’

  A dozen voices asked, ‘References?’

  ‘Sex is not a subject for library research. Try thinking – or whatever.’