The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  That was quite a gutful of challenge to absorb in two days, but it was Friday and most squaddies were going to their homes for the weekend. The population problem was left to simmer. It simmers still.

  2

  Squaddies raced into their civvy clothes, grabbed their bags and paused only for the regulation scan of the noticeboard. Then the small group of us who did not go home, for one reason or another, strolled to the board to see what might be new, and found nothing.

  But there was a street map on the board, a big one with City Center lined in red and the names of major buildings marked for reference. I examined it with a sting of old fascination, for in our fourth year City Center had at last been declared ‘in bounds’ to us. (Permission to be grown-up!)

  As kids we had talked of mysterious City Center and its fabulous corridors of power. In time we had learned that it was just an antiquarian’s delight of old buildings preserved through lack of funds to tear them down and rebuild, haunted by Small Sweet planners and programers and secretaries and runners of messages for the Top Sweet who made the State’s decisions. Longer in dying were the rumours of Swill robber gangs erupting from the sewer systems; we didn’t really believe those, but you could never be sure . . .

  Those who had actually seen the Center said that nobody in his right mind would go near the musty place – ‘Crummy buildings and almost nobody about.’ They were probably right but the glamour persisted. I wanted to see for myself.

  As I peered at the map a Swill voice whined in my ear, ‘Y’ wanna gwin, Teddy?’

  It was Arry, who could forget his Sweet speech at a fingersnap. He repeated, with apologetic care for trained elegance, ‘Do you want to go in, Teddy?’

  Of course I did, but civilian dress was obligatory for a City leave pass and I had none. I had outgrown my enlistment clothes and found no way to replace them; the State saw no reason to supply clothing coupons as well as uniforms.

  I said briefly, ‘No clothes,’ hiding the hurt. Then passed the hurt to Arry. ‘And where would you get city clothes?’ The gear the Swill kids wore to go home in would not do for the Center.

  He shot me the most curious sidewise look of benevolence and complicity. ‘Can get. Can borrow some for you, too.’

  I didn’t trust a word of that. Training or no training, Swill was Swill, and devious. But I wanted badly to see the Center. He took my silence for assent, or pretended to. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said, ‘in your dosser.’

  In less time than that he appeared in my cubicle with two complete outfits – trousers, shirts, belts, berets, the throatbands that were ‘in’ that year and two brassards identifying us as cadets. I recognized the stuff he gave me and knew it would fit, just as I knew its owner would be absent for two days and that he was a snot-nosed Sweet from whom Arry could never have cadged a loan of anything.

  ‘Skeleton keys?’

  ‘A loan,’ Arry insisted, his grin openly conniving. ‘But he’s the type who wouldn’t appreciate thanks.’

  I had qualms.

  And I had a chance to see City Center.

  I dressed.

  So did Arry, with a difference. As he put on each item he studied himself in my wall mirror, entranced by the portrait of a stranger. He had never in his life worn tailored, matched clothes.

  ‘Munt mucky,’ he murmured, warning himself, and I translated, Mustn’t muck them up.

  We collected our passes and went out.

  The South Gate of City Center was a half-hour’s walk away, straight down St. Kilda Road with its trees and lawns and National Trust buildings, each with its descriptive plaque – Hospital, Police Barracks, Hotel, Church of Christ Scientist (what the hell?) – to Princes Bridge.

  It was a hot and brilliant day with four hours of light remaining for seeing and discovering, I forgot the unease of ‘borrowed’ clothes and sang out, ‘It’s a terrific world, Arry!’ Then, mocking gently, ‘I mean, Harry.’

  He grinned his thin grin. ‘Arry’s right. That’s what my parents christened me. They didn’t know any better.’

  Parents? I came close to a social gaffe; one did not ask why another did not go home of a weekend. I would have found my own reasons impossible to make clear.

  He continued as if he had heard the unspoken. ‘And by the time I could have told them, they were dead.’ That raised a barrage of unaskable questions but he set out, unprompted, to answer them, as if he knew that I needed his confidence before I could unlock my own. ‘I was a street kid when I was seven. You know what that is?’ I knew the term, no more. ‘When tower folk die, others with too many in a flat will move in and take over. They won’t always look after any kids left behind. Sometimes the kids run out themselves. I ran out – the lot that took over were shit.’

  ‘So how did you live?’

  ‘Not hard. There’s thousands of street kids. Sleep anywhere – the corridors, the skirts if it isn’t raining, anywhere. You join a gang, beg, steal.’

  Barely comprehensible. ‘But what about food, clothes when they wear out, times when you’re sick?’

  His answer began, I think, my understanding of the Swill subculture, of the order under filth and violence.

  ‘The Tower Boss looks after his own. He sees they get what they’re supposed to.’ His voice held a memory of trust in that unlikely system; the Swill boy had learned to speak but hadn’t shed his breeding.

  I said compulsively, ‘I know a Tower Boss and he’s a murdering animal.’

  Arry was unsurprised. ‘They’re all that sometimes, when they have to be. The Boss fights to be Boss and he fights to stay Boss and he fights for his people because nobody else will. You wouldn’t know what the towers are like.’

  True. I couldn’t say a sensible word about them, only ask questions like, ‘Are there schools there?’

  ‘Not any more. But there’s teachers.’

  ‘Well, how . . . ?’

  His permanent grin edged gently under my skin, ‘Machines take over Sweet jobs and educated Sweet fall down into the Swill. They teach because that’s all they’re good for, most of them. The Bosses try to get them for smart kids. I got one who used to be a real teacher in schools.’

  ‘But if there are no schools and records, how do you get picked for Testing?’

  ‘Teachers tell the Tower Boss when they think they’ve got a good one and the Boss arranges the Test.’

  That was astonishing in its implication of interaction between towers and State. One thought of the towers as limbo, ignored. I said, a bit impatiently, ‘You make the Bosses sound like State servants.’

  He thought seriously about that. ‘No, but there’s a kind of communication through the coppers, a sort of give and take, where both sides know what they can do.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  He said shortly, ‘It does. It’s worked out between the Bosses and the coppers. The State makes the rules so everyone gets fed and housed – up to a point – but the real work of running the towers is done by coppers and Swill. It’s not laws and paperwork but knowing how far you can go in one place and how you have to do it a different way in another.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s possible.’

  ‘Nobody spells it out, but that’s the way of it. Sort of trial and error. How does it fit the Boss you know?’

  ‘He’s just a thieving stand-over bastard.’

  ‘How else do you think they can work in multi-story pigsties? What’s his name?’

  ‘Kovacs.’

  ‘The Billygoat?’ He was impressed, which riled me. ‘Everybody knows about him. He’s one of the old school – bust their heads first, then tell them how to behave, and keep kicking their arses till they learn. The new young ones are different – you’d almost think they’ve been trained.’

  As simply as that, not knowing that he did, he told me with the certainty of revelation what career Nick had planned for me, explaining all his patience and his angers, everything he had said and done. It was as well that our paths had split – I was no
t going to be dedicated to the Swill by any high-minded do-gooder.

  At the South Gate I put Nick and Kovacs out of my mind as we flashed our wristlets at the Telltale and it checked us through to City Center.

  3

  From the bridge entrance we gawked at the skyline as if we had never seen it from the other side of the barrier. It was said not to have changed since the nineties, when the first crumbling of the financial basis had rocked the building industry, that old barometer of fiscal stability. That recession was a historical milepost, the beginning of the end of the old era, but we had never fully understood the tutorial explanations of the erosion of an economic system which had persisted through millennia. We saw the silliness of the basic concept that expansion was limited only by natural resources but not how the old economists had let themselves be fooled by it. Their theories had not included one for stopping the rot.

  Those old buildings were not tall by comparison with the tenement towers; most were narrow and slab-sided; some had been sheathed in glass (a pretty stupid vanity) which had cracked off in places and been patched by more sensible materials that stared like blind eyes, but a few still shone brilliantly in the late sun. Most were dirty grey or deposit-streaked, standing like shabby sentries over the canyons at their feet.

  Arry said, ‘It makes you wonder.’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘Why they built tall and then put up the towers taller still.’ His syntax was loosening, on holiday from speech class. ‘They knew it was no good. Last century, they called them high-rise workers’ flats, and all they got was trouble.’ I hadn’t known that and it didn’t seem to justify his sudden anger. He became shrill. ‘They turned people into battery hens except they didn’t lay.’ That sounded like a book phrase and I said so, but he insisted, ‘They failed once, but they started again, seventy-story ones, and jammed 9 million people into them. People lived like pigs there but they still built up. Why?’ His skinny body shook and his voice slopped over into the Swill whine. ‘Wai, Teddy? Wai tay doot’us?’

  What do you say to anguish you don’t understand? He sniffed and with a hint of Swill savagery daring me to laugh, said with classroom care, ‘Why did they do it to us?’

  He wanted a slick Sweet answer he could mangle and fling back but I preferred peace. ‘I suppose they couldn’t think of anything better. You’ve seen triv pictures of Calcutta and Shanghai and South America and Africa – all shanties and lean-tos, no sewers, no taps, no way to distribute food, only street mud to walk on. We’re better off than those.’ So I found myself defending the State everyone knew to be a failure. ‘They did the best they could.’

  ‘So we’re still the Lucky Country!’

  That phrase had come down the years to haunt us, seeming to mean that we always escaped the worst of the world’s troubles by luck or distance, but in Arry’s mouth it was a Swill curse.

  From the bridge I looked down on the river, a filthy, garbage-brown flood running bank high only a few meters below my feet, carrying branches and bottles and dead animals and clutches of nameless flotsam. Probably sewage overflow as well. It didn’t quite stink but threw up the smell of Kovacs on that first day, the sharpness of Swill decay.

  It was as broad as a football field, covering the platforms of the disused railway station on one bank, lapping at the walls of the derelict concert hall on the other and spreading out of sight through the abandoned streets of South Melbourne.

  Arry read the gauge clipped to a lamp standard. ‘Four meters of flood water. The triv’ll say rain in the hills.’

  Those were the years when Victoria got its share of mad weather as the Antarctic shelf melted, cooling major currents and altering their courses, raising fog-banks, changing the temperature gradients and the line of the prevailing winds, drowning untillable desert in useless water while ancient forests grew brown and bare under a brass-faced sun, giving this year and taking next, turning grassland to tinder while it poured unwanted, polluted water down the rivers.

  Arry was matter-of-fact. ‘Your Kovacs’ll get a wet arse. Newport’s right on the river flat. They’ll go two floors under in this lot.’

  ‘Cheerful sod,’ I told him, but I thought of Mum with that wasted guilt I could do nothing about. Her house was high enough to escape flooding. Or was it? I did not know. I hoped in a convulsion of rage and entreaty that Kovacs was earning his mean dollars, looking after her, not shrugging his bony shoulders and walking away from trouble.

  He couldn’t walk away – he was living there. A swift, sick feeling that I must swallow pride and go home vanished into the smell of Kovacs and the river. What brings you home, Teddy-boy? Your mum’s safe with me. Piss off, little Sweet!

  Arry brought me back to the world. ‘The Sweet all live at Balwyn Heights and such, but the bloody Swill can drown!’

  But the neglect had nothing to do with caste. We could only vaguely imagine the billions it would cost to hold back the rivers and the rising sea but we knew without any vagueness that the State was broke.

  We crossed the bridge into the Center.

  Crummy buildings and almost nobody. Years ago the business houses had moved out to the suburbs on the breakdown of public transport as people ceased to travel to work that did not exist. Now the business houses did not exist. In City Center the old buildings housed State Departments employing three-quarters of the work force, so there could have been a quarter of a million people in the forty blocks of the Center.

  We did not see many of them; they were inside, running the State, appearing briefly in the street when shifts changed. The few in sight were there with purpose, moving in duty from one nexus to another; there was little for them to look at or linger over.

  The streets were clean, tended by rolling robots that prowled the gutters and made forays on to footpaths when their sensors told them nobody was in the way. We amused ourselves forcing them back into the gutters, stepping in front of one as it spied a scrap of garbage and lurched after it, asking the thing’s pardon and exchanging witty wonderings as to whether a machine could become frustrated. Passersby paid no attention. Our brassards told who and what we were and they must have had a gutful of Extra cadets exhibiting their sophistication on leave.

  There were few shops. You could buy magazines and snack food but only a couple of stores sold clothing or theater bookings or anything but immediate necessities. The Center was used, not lived in. It was inert.

  Yet there were things to see. The old public library had been preserved and in a culture of tapes and data banks its contents were fabulous. More than a million books in one place was hard to credit; believing they were all worth preserving was harder. Most were surely not worth a glance, much less the reverent handling by library staff, but a hint at this brought a curl to the antiquarian lip. No other member of the public was there, so why, if nobody used them, should they be preserved? Because they were there?

  History was there, glooming uselessly in the street. Arry said, ‘It’s dead. There’s people but they’re dead too.’

  Yet for all its mustiness the Center was in use, not just dustsheeted over for uninterested posterity. We found a cafeteria but the food was in the high-coupon range of catering for employees with generous bonus grants. I would have turned away but Arry said, ‘I’ll shout you.’

  ‘What with?’ He showed me, for an instant, a wad of blue bonus coupons thick enough to choke a glutton before he stuffed them back into his pocket.

  ‘Stolen!’ I must have sounded a prize prig, all shock and righteousness, but we Sweet kids were raised to believe that stealing was out. A precious pack of little sods we were.

  ‘My Tower Boss sent them to me.’

  I had an ungenerous vision of a Boss suckholing to an Extra who might be useful to him later on. I didn’t credit the man with being proud of his ugly duckling and risking his freedom to look after him, only grunted gracelessly that they must have been stolen in the first place.

  Arry explained patiently that coupons were bas
ic exchange, passed on by police for ‘favours’ received. Payment for informing and betraying, sneered my holier-than-thou upbringing while my stomach thought over the food displayed on the shelves.

  ‘There’s some advantages in being Swill,’ Arry said. ‘Not many but some.’

  We ordered a meal that might have done for a State senior in a triv drama. Morality shuddered but gorged.

  Afterward we found, right on the eastern edge, an old building with a decorative façade that stamped great age all over it, the Princess Theater. Its plaque said it was built in the nineteenth century and was still in use. The Early Cinematograph Society was playing a season of films we had never heard of, so we used some more of Arry’s coupons.

  It was a peculiar experience watching what our great-grand-parents had enjoyed, probably thinking it the last word in crashbang technology. They were short films covering a century or more of cinema ‘art’, if that’s the word. It was all two-dimensional, pre-triv; some had no colour and some had no sound, like cartoons where actors doubled for the drawings. Much was nearly unintelligible because acting styles have changed and notions of drama become more sophisticated. Only the early comedies, slapstick without dialogue, were wholly intelligible through primitive and idiotic, but Arry laughed himself into stitches and insisted on seeing out the whole program. I decided that the Swill must create most of their own amusement, which doesn’t make for artistic sensitivity.

  When we got out into the street again, it was dark.

  We walked on the floors of half-lit canyons. Windows gleamed where night shifts worked (doing what among the banked computers and automated operations?) but most were dark; upper floors vanished into a sky cloud-covered and threatening rain. The footpaths were lit at cost-saving intervals, one lamp standard in three glowing in a passage of shadows. The whole complex was so quiet that tiny noises at a distance were identifiable as footsteps or scraps of paper rustling as they blew or soft conversations between ghosts in invisible places.