by Brian Aldiss
While Sonia and you played on the newly revealed stretch of beach, your parents sat nearby on deck chairs. Both were fully dressed; your father, you remember, wore highly polished brown shoes. They always kept anxious eyes on Sonia who, in consequence, was nervous, and did not like to splash in the deeper pools. You were absorbed some distance away, chasing a small crab with your shrimping net. The intense murmuring silences of the sea were broken by Sonia’s shrieks and your father’s shouts at you. You caught the crab in your net before turning.
Sonia was lying on her back a few feet away, her hair in a shallow pool. She was crying in terror. Your father was ordering you to go to her aid. You popped the crab in your rubber pail and then ran over to her. While helping her to her feet, you could not understand why she had not got up of her own accord.
Your father was furious with you. ‘Why didn’t you hurry? Sonia could have drowned!’
‘No, she couldn’t. Her face was not in the water.’
He clenched his fist. ‘She almost drowned.’
‘No, she didn’t, dad, really.’
‘Don’t you argue with me, boy!’
‘I’m just saying her face –’
‘She was helpless. You didn’t care one bit, you little wretch.’
‘I rescued her, didn’t I?’
‘Go back to the bungalow at once! Get off the beach! Go away!’
After tipping your crab back into the warm pool, you made your way up the beach.
‘Come back, Stevie!’ called Sonia. ‘I’m all right! Really I am!’
You did not turn your head. You made your way down Archibald Lane without a tear. You went into Omega and settled down to read a book. You never in your childhood saw the beaches of Walcot again.
4
An Absolute Slave
Of course there were other Wilberforces, other Fieldings.
You recall various splurges with some of them, and with other friends of yours – indeed, splurges too with strangers. Splurges when you were half-boy, half-adult, ending up in Indian restaurants, swilling down glasses of Kingfisher lager, showing off, laughing ‘fit to bust’.
You remember going off to pee one time, almost falling down the steep steps to Avernus, into the reeking, hot basement, realizing you were drunk, staggering, running your dirty hand over the dirty walls to steady yourself. Alien territory, sopping towels lying exhausted on the floor, doors marked successively STAFF, PRIVATE, LADIES, KEEP OUT. A fellow rushing by, throwing out a look of contempt as you were already unzipping, ready for the outpouring. GENTS, it said. And you smelt the urine/disinfectant smell like soup spilt on an oilcloth table cover. You tossed away in disgust from between your lips the half-puffed fag. It fell on the red-tiled floor. You directed a first splash at it to put it out, laughing weakly, then directing all your energy to the hard squirt into the china bowl, in which sodden things lay. You used your penis like a hose, amused to direct it to splash right up the wall. It writhed in your fingers, glad as a puppy for its master’s touch.
You did not know then that a time would come when you would climb unsteadily down those same stairs, to that same urinal, this time going slowly, hobbling even, the frayed remnant of what you cherished proudly long ago already leaking into your trousers in anticipation and then, when you make it to the sordid bowl, unable to produce anything but an irregular drip. You would lean your arm against the wall and your head against your arm and you would spit into the yellow trail below. You would not be miserable exactly. You would just know that you had run out of spark and spunk and steam, and would be sort of semi-glad of it. But all this awaits you in the future.
You and all your pals.
Early in life you saw what old age and its captivities meant. You were fortunate, in that respect, to escape.
You mean I will not become a prisoner in my old age?
That is not my meaning exactly.
What do you mean?
Let us continue with your timelife story.
You worry me. What do you mean?
No, you do not worry. That’s just a figure of speech. You will become old but never reach extreme old age.
You had a girlfriend at this period, as young as you but with plenty of female assurance. Her name was Gale Roberts, a rather cinematic name which bestowed glamour on her. Her mother was a big, hearty woman, who liked to praise things in general. She called you ‘sensible’. When she despatched you and Gale to visit her Uncle Norman and his wife, Tamsin, she described their tragedy in enthusiastic terms.
‘She’s totally incapacitated, poor darling thing! She bears her misfortune so nobly. And my brother – well, Norman’s such a sweetie-pie! Of course, an absolute slave to Tammy, an absolute slave, he does everything, but everything for her. As you’ll see, my dear.’
The visit proved a memorable one.
Tamsin Roberts had ‘broken her back’, as the phrase had it, when crossing a road in France and encountering a slow-moving vehicle. She suffered complex fractures of several vertebrae. Both Robertses were in their early fifties; to you they seemed vastly old. They lived in a small terraced house, the upper floor of which they let out.
When you rang the bell, Norman peeped out before nodding and letting you both in.
‘Just doing a spot of cleaning,’ he said with a laugh that affected at once to laugh at himself and to explain the floral apron he was wearing. Norman was a small, dry man with a sandy moustache and a large red nose. He clutched a yellow duster.
Tamsin was confined to an armchair in what had been their dining room, where she could gaze out at the small garden. Now she got her meals on a tray. Her husband, Gale’s uncle, looked after her, doing everything for her; dressing her, undressing her, shopping and cooking for her.
Somehow they remained cheerful. The radio was always on. They kept two cats, Mike and Snippets, both tabbies. The cats hung about in picturesque positions on items of furniture, the one on the piano, the other on a side table. When they moved, they moved carefully about the little crowded room, full of its small tables, its china figures and its potted plants.
Gale presented the Roberts with a cake her mother had baked. They chatted of small things. Tamsin spoke in a flat voice, but appeared cheerful enough. Norman said he pushed her up the street and back in her wheelchair every day, when all the neighbours came out to speak to them.
‘What a lot they are,’ said Tamsin, looking slightly humorous as she referred to the neighbours.
As you and Gale were about to leave, Norman ushered you out, saying, ‘Careful how you go. Mind the ironing board. I’ve just got to iron one of Tammy’s nighties. I’ll just shut the kitchen door. We love the cats so much; we don’t want them to escape. We never let them go outside.’
So off the two of you went, carefree and skipping up the street, Gale swinging her mother’s wicker shopping basket. You were getting to the stage when you might dare to kiss Gale.
‘So what do you make of that pair of old crocks?’ Gale asked.
‘Your uncle’s very good with Tamsin. Life can’t be much fun for him.’
Gale sat down on a low wall, adjusting her dress so that first you saw a lot of thigh and then none. ‘I reckon uncle enjoys being prison warden.’ She spoke carelessly.
‘Prison warden? How do you make that out?’ You stood in front of her, your trousers all but touching her knees. ‘I thought he was her slave. Isn’t that the general idea?’
She tossed a lock of dark hair from her eyes. It immediately fell back into its original position, its lowest strands to rest on her rosy cheek. ‘You heard what he said – about the cats, I mean. He loves the cats but is afraid they may escape. So they are stuck for ever in the house. Could be he feels the same about her.’
‘You mean he feels Tamsin might escape?’
‘Maybe he used to. You can see how insecure he is. He’s glad she is stuck in that chair, unable to get away from him.’
Such a concept had not occurred to you. The novelty, the secrecy of it, t
hrilled you in some way. ‘But what does she feel?’
Gale sighed and looked up at you with a contemplative air. ‘Work it out for yourself. Could be she likes being a prisoner. She was always a bit valetudinarian, even when she was young – like her mum.’
‘So you’re saying they get on okay?’
‘I’m saying it may not be the way it looks, with them both being miserable. Just could be it even suits them.’
‘But you can’t ask them –’
She reached out and touched your hand. ‘Of course you can’t ask them, silly!’
‘What a bugger that you can’t ask them straight out.’
But your mind was not really on that mystery of human relationships; it centred more on Gale’s pretty, moist lips. You leant forward, clutched her shoulders and kissed her.
The world turned to gold dust about you.
You often wondered what sort of person Valerie had been in her short life. After the visit to the Roberts’ house, you found reason to wonder about yourself. You had gone on this rather boring – as you initially saw it – visit to an invalid, simply to be near Gale. You were well aware of the life of the senses, even if, at that early age, you stood as yet high and dry on its shores. You were also aware of another life, one that might hinder or distract you from the sensual oceans represented by the tepid lake of Gale Roberts, and that was one to which she herself had directed your attention: the life of human motivation, so cunning, so unfathomable.
For which way had it been in the invalid’s semi-detached home? Was old Norman the slave or the captor? Was she the dominatrix or the prisoner? Only slowly, as you sat upstairs in your bedroom, gazing blankly at the painting of birds quietly despoiling a wheat harvest, did it occur to you that both interpretations, such was the complexity of the human psyche, could be simultaneously viable.
Yet never did it occur to you that there were parallels here with your own unresolved dilemma; the Walcot problem.
5
‘Bloody Cripples!’
When Martin joined Short’s, another aviation company, the family followed him to Southampton, where Short Brothers was based. You saw little of your father. Politics kept him busy.
You remember an occasion when he had been addressing a small group of men on a street corner. He came home and told you that a policeman had appeared and said to him, gently but firmly, ‘Move along there, there’s a good lad.’
Your father had asked why he should move along. The bobby had replied, ‘Because I say so, sir, if you don’t mind.’
Your father was furious at this demonstration of power.
Looking back, you regret the disappearance of this kind of policing.
Your early existence was trapped between the two world wars, your later one by the Cold War. Your father provided constant reminders of the first war. The injury to his leg pained him continually; the broken bone had been badly set in the first place, and had to be re-broken and re-set. Throughout your boyhood, he was in and out of hospital. The aggravation increased his bitterness and his silence.
‘Does your poor leg hurt very much, Daddy?’ you asked him on one occasion, perhaps trying to curry favour.
‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ he said. It had become a favourite expression.
‘Do you have to sacrifice us?’ Sonia asked. As the spoilt one, she dared to criticize.
In fact, Martin had been lucky. He had survived the prolonged Battle of the Somme, a battle in which a million men had died – Germans, French and British – owing to a well-timed attack of pneumonia.
Your home was not generously provided with books. You remember one book in particular from those early days; it was bound in half-leather and consisted of twelve volumes: The Daily Telegraph History of the Great War. Through an absorbed study of those volumes, you gained an insight into the various hells through which your father had suffered and through which humankind put one another.
One painting reproduced in that book almost destroyed you with pity. The scene was in France; the ruins of a French town could be discerned mistily in the distance. In the foreground lay a wounded horse. It had to be left behind by the troops. The troops could be seen in the background, beckoning to a figure in the middle ground to hurry up and join them. But the figure in the middle ground lingered. His hand was raised in sad farewell to his horse. He it was who provided the caption to the picture: ‘Farewell, old friend!’
You were inconsolable. You cried and cried until your mother became angry and left you to weep. The argument that this was ‘only a painting’ carried no weight with you, for you felt certain it was a representation of something that could have happened, where the innocent suffered along with the wicked.
Surely at that time, one of your admirable qualities was born and fortified: compassion.
For the first thirteen months of the family’s removal to Southampton, you all stayed in a rented flat. Your father and mother could not find a house on which they could get a mortgage that they liked enough to buy. You were allotted a small room in the attic, where you were probably better situated than were the other members of the family. Sonia had a small room overlooking a banana importer’s yard. The wallpaper was violently colourful and featured the endlessly reduplicated image of an animal with big ears driving a little red car. To this Sonia took strident objection.
‘I hate it! I hate it! Take it away. It’s horrid.’
‘You’ll soon get used to it, darling,’ Mary had said, wearily. ‘This was a child’s room and, after all, you are a child, you know.’
Sonia screamed in response to this apparent injustice. ‘I am not that kind of a child. I am a child hunchback! A famous child hunchback! I’m special. I can’t sleep with this horrid thing hanging on the wall.’
‘Valerie would love that wallpaper! Please don’t be troublesome, dear.’
‘It’s not me. It’s the wallpaper.’
But Sonia had to put up with it. And there in that flat you spent a confined Christmas. Before you had your presents, Mary insisted on crimping Sonia’s hair. Protest as Sonia might, the tongs, the crimping paper, were brought to bear, and soon her chestnut locks were covered with waves like a sea of frozen gravy. The scorching smell still lingered round her head even when you sat down to dinner later that day.
Wished upon you was a girl of twelve, bigger than you and even more sulky, a girl of twelve with pigtails, by name Joan Pie. Martin had joined the local trade union. One of his docker friends had been struck by a falling girder. He was lying in hospital after a shoulder operation and his wife was ill, so Martin had generously volunteered to have Joan Pie come to stay with you all over Christmas and Boxing Day.
‘I don’t want to sit next to her,’ Sonia said, after one second’s inspection of the visitor. ‘She’s a pig.’
‘Ooh, snooty!’ said Joan Pie, and poked her tongue out at Sonia.
‘Behave yourselves,’ Mary ordered. But from then on, you two youngsters had conceived a hatred of this intruder into your uncomfortable quarters. You and Sonia were immediately united against her.
You asked your sister at the dinner table if she had ever heard of such a funny name as Pie. ‘Fly is silly too,’ Sonia said in a judicious manner. She asked the visitor, ‘Do you know anyone called Fly, Pie?’
‘Stop that, or I’ll make you get down,’ said Martin from his side of the table.
Now Mary was slicing and serving the Christmas pudding, doing it with slow care. You watched the operation like a hawk, alert for injustice.
Your plate with a slice of pudding was set down before you. Next, Joan Pie was served. Then Sonia. Suddenly, your mother exclaimed. Leaning forward, she rapidly switched your plate with Sonia’s.
You were angry at once. ‘Why did you do that?’
Mary waved her hands about. ‘I gave you the wrong plates, that’s all. Nothing else. Have some custard, Stevie.’
‘How were they wrong?’
‘Just be grateful for what you’ve got,’ Martin said
, sternly.
‘Yes, be grateful for what you’ve got,’ echoed Joan Pie, giving Martin a silly look, seeking his approval.
‘You’ve got a bigger piece of pudding now, Stephen, so be quiet,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie would never complain as you do.’
You subsided. The Bird’s custard circulated in its little boat. You all ate in silence. Christmas pudding, dark, reluctant to crumble, heavy as mud, comprising many unknown things, bizarrely pleasing and quelling to the taste buds, a thing of the Stone Age. Eaten once a year like a human sacrifice.
Sonia gave a shriek and plunged her fingers into the sodden mass on her plate.
‘Look! I’ve got it!’ She waved a little bright object, to which a squashed currant adhered. ‘A sixpence! I’ve found a sixpence.’
You burst into tears. Well, you were only eight.
Only eight, but a bit of a baby.
You perceived that you had been swindled. It was a case of naked favouritism – And a reminder to me that I had been born into an unjust world.
No, the world has its invariable laws. It is human society which has established injustice.
Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to remember –
It is necessary to remember, and to proceed.
After the meal, you had indoor fireworks. You and your sister loved indoor fireworks. There were paper mazes to which Martin applied his glowing cigarette end at the position marked ‘Start’, at which a spark went racing across the blank spaces to a destination it celebrated with quite a loud crack. There were sparklers you could hold and wave in dazzling patterns. There were folded papers that burnt into pretty ferns. There were flimsy paper cylinders to which you applied a lighted match and, as the paper burned down, magically rose and ascended to the ceiling. And there were snakes.
How you both loved the snakes.
By this time, you were in a better mood to enjoy the snakes. To comfort you, Sonia had whispered that she would share the sixpence, giving you half. Still grieving over the injustice, you had responded grumpily that it was your sixpence.
