Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  Martin ignored the remark. ‘You’ve become one of The Poor, I’m sorry to say. Yet The Poor in the old sense are disappearing. What were once luxuries are now seen as necessities; take central heating for instance. Do you have it in this dump? No.’

  ‘I can live without it.’

  He turned to direct a look of sorrow at you. ‘You say that now, yet a few years ago you were buying chateaux in France. We spoilt you and your sister, now all you’ve got is a second-rate job and one room in a slum like Blackall Square … Time it was pulled down.’

  You felt bad. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Dad? I’m afraid it’s all I can offer. If you came here just to tick me off, don’t bother. I feel bad enough as it is.’

  He shook his head. ‘I am not ticking you off, laddie. I’m just worried about you, as any good father would be. How old are you now? While you’re rotting here, England is changing – rapidly, and for the better. We’ve got new drugs and new technologies, better ways of governing. The bad old days of booms and busts are over. Now we’re capital-intensive and labour-saving. Your grandfather would hardly recognize the country if he came back –’

  ‘Fine. Well, Dad, let’s have a cup of tea together. Believe me, I did rethink my life while I was banged up.’

  As you put the kettle on the gas ring he said, ‘It’s not just socialism, it’s a world trend, at least in the Western world. Inexplicable really …’ He fell silent, musing. Then he said, ‘You know, Britain led the world in the eighteenth century. We began the Industrial Revolution.’

  ‘I know, Dad.’

  ‘With the coming of mechanization, what did the Continentals do? They made little artificial singing birds in gilt cages, and little human-looking dummies who signed their names. All toys, really. Meanwhile, the British working man was digging canals and building bridges. It’s something to be proud of. It’s what has made us great.’

  Listening to Martin, you felt ashamed you did not love your country more.

  You poured hot water on the tea bags. ‘You can buy circular teabags now,’ he said. ‘The old square ones are going off sale.’

  ‘Evolution even in teabags …’

  ‘No sugar for me, thanks, Steve; I’ve given it up. Putting on weight … Getting old. Got a touch of diabetes, as a matter of fact. The trouble with labour-saving devices is they are also labour-cancelling. Progress hits the old working class. There’s not quite the solidarity there used to be. Sons are now going to universities! Can you believe it?’

  ‘That’s something to be pleased about, surely.’

  He sipped his tea with undue caution. ‘We were going down the drain, now it’s the reverse. It’s the West outshining the Soviets. Although I hate to say so, last year’s Apollo 14, and the two moon walks, are an apotheosis of capitalism; adventure, initiative, innovation …’

  ‘I’ve never heard you speak well of capitalism before.’

  ‘You claim you had a rethink when you were behind bars; I’m having a bit of a rethink too. As some chap was singing the other day, “The Times They are A-Changing …”’

  He shook your hand as he got up to go. After he had left, leaving you a fiver, you thought, ‘Gosh, we actually had a conversation. Of a kind …’

  An Avon lady came to call on you. She was pretty, brightly painted, plump, in her mid-thirties. She wore a black two-piece over a white, well-filled blouse, a neat flared skirt and a saucy jacket with mock-gold buttons. Her shoes were red. Her lips were orange. Her eyes were green.

  She was selling cosmetics; you said you had no need of cosmetics. She asked if you were married; you told her you were divorced. She was sympathetic, and remarked on how much you must miss female company. She crossed her legs as she spoke, revealing a shapely calf and thigh.

  You admitted that you did miss female company.

  ‘You poor dear,’ she exclaimed. ‘Come and let me give you a cuddle.’

  You learnt later that her name was Judy. She wore black underwear.

  Her ministrations were extremely pleasurable. She liked you to be naked, but would never strip off entirely herself. ‘I have to be businesslike, you know,’ she said with a smile. She was cheerful, she was meticulously clean, she liked fornication, she liked sexual organs – her own and yours.

  While studying yours on one occasion, she chuckled and said, ‘They’re funny, aren’t they?’ in a slightly puzzled way. ‘Yet they produce such wonderful sensations.’

  Judy never asked questions. In a sense, she was not interested in you. You discovered that she never voted; politics meant nothing to her; nor did the wider world. Yet it was not that Judy was unintelligent. The sensual world enveloped her. When you commented on her shining dark hair, which was kept short, Judy told you that she was a natural blonde.

  You were surprised. ‘I thought the ideal for women was to be blonde.’

  ‘I dyed mine black because I thought with blonde hair, I looked like a tart.’

  When aroused, Judy gave forth a delectable scent – a lure. You were permitted, indeed encouraged, to study her neat little lower purse. It amused you to think of it as plump and well-fed. You kissed its smiling lips and sank your tongue deep into it, lured by her strange, but irresistible, aroma. When your sessions in that bare blue room were over, she would dress herself, use your primitive toilet and go on her way.

  She came to your bed every other Thursday.

  The question of money never arose between you.

  Some years later, as you passed through the cosmetics department of a big store, you saw Judy standing behind a counter, the same old Judy, possibly slightly plumper. The recognition was immediate and mutual. She gave you a slight smile and a wink, as if to say, without regret, ‘We had a bit of fun, didn’t we? Don’t tell anyone!’

  4

  ‘We Don’t Want No Trouble’

  You were saying goodbye to Judy on the front doorstep one day. You noticed a taxi wending its way past the grim old brick tower of the Salvation Army fortress and entering the square. A taxi in the square was a rare sight.

  It drew up in front of Number 12. From it emerged your Aunt Violet, who went round to the other side of the vehicle to help your grandmother, Elizabeth Fielding, put her daintily shod feet to the ground. Violet linked her arm with Elizabeth’s to assist her into the house.

  You showed the ladies into your room. Elizabeth you seated on your only chair, the blue-painted hardback. Violet sat on the edge of your rumpled bed. You stood, smiling and embarrassed. You noted Violet’s covert response to the atmosphere of the room; she had identified the scent, which had not yet dispersed.

  ‘Who was the woman who just left, Steve?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, she was the Avon lady. I didn’t buy any of her cosmetics.’

  ‘What else was she selling?’

  ‘Nothing,’ you said, with perfect honesty.

  Violet cocked an eyebrow above her spectacles but said nothing. She was looking much older than when you had last seen her.

  Elizabeth spoke, possibly aware of a certain tension in your exchange. ‘I saw on my television set … Launched. The set. That the Americans have launched another rocket … To the Moon, a rocket. It’s so clever.’

  You agreed that it was clever.

  The ladies sat in their respective positions, regarding you. You offered to make them some instant coffee. They refused.

  Speaking rather formally, Violet said, ‘Joyce – perhaps you remember my daughter, Joyce – has a new job in a government planning office.’

  She paused there until you said, ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘You know of the government scheme to demolish some of the country’s slums, to build high-rises instead?’

  Again she waited for a sign of your assent, frowning meanwhile.

  ‘The scheme includes the demolition of Blackall Square. We thought you ought to know.’

  You said nothing. You were shocked. ‘When?’ you managed to ask.

  ‘Joyce says that March next year is the date set. It h
as yet to be announced; they’re waiting till after the by-election.’

  Elizabeth spoke, clutching the scraggy folds of her throat. ‘Steve, you must come away. Must leave here. It’s not fit. It’s a good … that is, it’s better. My intention … Let me say quickly. In my will, my intention … it was to leave … I mean, you, you some money. To leave. In my will. My daughter speaks … hardly speaks … Your aunt hardly speaks … Bella hardly speaks to me now. She’s earning in Brussels now … Good money. Earning. Some money in the will, but much better to give now … Give you the … what did I say? Give the money now … Just to help. To get you out of your bad time.’

  ‘Elizabeth, dear, you –’

  ‘Calle Galina. The house,’ she said quickly, raising a hand to interrupt you. ‘I have inherited. Dorothy … my friend who owned … it. The house … She’s Dorothy. I have inherited Calle … You were there – Calle Galina. She, my dear Dorothy, has died of … She nursed you once. On her, oh, her knee, yes, as a baby. There were complica … Complications. I may go to live out my years … final years. Let me do this. For you. Dear boy.’

  ‘Then you can study,’ said Violet. She looked at you as if you were a stranger. ‘Lead a decent life. It’s an absurd idea, living here like this. Particularly when your sister is doing so well in America.’

  You were angry and troubled after the ladies had gone. You did not rejoice at this stroke of good fortune.

  In fact, I cried … I cried because … it’s hard to say. Because I did not deserve the good fortune. Because it seemed so arbitrary. Because – oh, I had a romantic view of failure.

  And?

  Later, I felt … oh, I felt the closure was rotten luck on everyone who lived out their mortal lives in the rotten old square. Like woodlice under a stone.

  Harming no one.

  So you went and had a drink with Caleb …

  You were boozing in the Gardeners Arms, as usual. Caleb was the enthusiast. You had graduated from pints of beer to boilermakers – beers with whisky chasers. You were sitting in one corner of the room, elbows on the table. The pub was crowded and noisy, full mainly of men. The air was blue with smoke. There was a real fug, which was getting into your heads. This was ‘The Life of Blokes’ with a vengeance; many there found it fulfilling.

  ‘I used to swim in the Med every evening in the summer,’ Caleb said. ‘As naked as I was born. I hated the tourists, bloody tourists. We lived in a village south of Barcelona, just a kilometre inland from the Med. It was okay, a bit primitive.

  ‘Not many tourists came in our village. Not much accommodation. There was one thin guy, old man, with spectacles, too scholarly to be a proper yob of a tourist. Came several years with his daughter. She was pretty for an English woman. I fancied her – dark in a sort of Spanish way. Some nights the father he got rather smashed. Tipsy, you know? She’d take him home.’

  Caleb scratched his blue jowls, thinking back to that time.

  ‘This particular night, I looked in the bodega – our one and only bodega – with a pal. We’d been swimming. And this old man had gone and left a book behind, an English book. I took hold of it. I was trying to learn English.

  ‘My first English novel! Caleb Williams. Godwin. That was the author’s name, William Godwin. It’s a masterpiece! I wanted to visit to that dark, villainous country Godwin described.’ Caleb stopped suddenly. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

  ‘We were talking about the demolition of the square.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Caleb sighed and took another swig of his beer. ‘That summer, the village, my village, is demolished. Absolutely destroyed. We waked up one morning and already the bulldozers are at work. Rmmm rmmm rmmm. This was the Generalissimo’s idea – for a coast road. So anything in the way of this road had to be destroyed, laid flat. Fucking high-handedness, you see? Fascism is like that. Fucking high-handedness.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about Blackall Square before the bulldozers arrive?’

  He threw his whisky down his throat, tipping his bald head back to do so.

  ‘We get the fuck out of here,’ he said. ‘As we had to get the fuck out of our little village.’

  You reminded him that your father was Undersecretary of State for Housing. You could appeal to him.

  Caleb made a wide sweeping gesture, brushing your suggestion aside. ‘Never appeal to authority. Once you show your face, you’re in trouble. Take the word of a Steppenwolf. Never appeal to your father. What we shall do, yeah, what we shall do, is hold a protest meeting. Get the Finsbury Chronicle involved. Right? Are you ready for another drink?’

  ‘I’m not a drunk, you know. I became a new man when I was banged up.’

  ‘Good – have another drink to celebrate!’

  You did not tell Caleb about your sudden good fortune. Your grandmother’s kindness fermented inside you.

  Blackall Square consisted of three-storey buildings, many with cellars, just like Number 12. They stood shoulder to shoulder, faced with grey cladding, capped with slate roofing. Iron railings stood a yard in front of the houses, guarding them. An indwelling melancholy had perhaps been there from the start, ever since the square came into being in the late nineteenth century. But in those days there would have been more vitality in evidence; carriages would have come and gone, street sellers might have cried their wares. All that activity had faded with the wars; nothing had replaced it. An active class of people had been succeeded by the unwanted – people sad, docile, but resentful of their fates. Big red buses roared along the main road only a street away, ignoring the backwater of the square.

  The present inhabitants of Blackall Square had never previously experienced a protest meeting. Caleb stood on the top step by your door, beckoning people nearer, calling to them to get together, showing, you thought, great spirit. You went about the square, knocking on doors, trying to persuade people to come out, assuring them it was in their interest to listen because their homes were under threat.

  ‘We don’t want no trouble, mister,’ some told us.

  ‘It’s not for us to say. Council knows best.’

  ‘Clear off, mate, or I’ll set the dog on you!’

  ‘They may find us somewhere better to live, don’t you think?’

  All told, you managed to marshal twenty-two people between you, the majority being older women. The ex-sergeant who ran the bath place, Colin, had locked up and come along to listen.

  Caleb began to speak, his voice rather controlled at first. ‘This lousy government of ours has decided to pull down our square. It has planned to let it go to rack and ruin, so it thinks no one will care about it. So it guesses we will be glad to let it be destroyed. The bad news will shortly be announced, so we have to act now. This square is our home and we must fight to preserve it.’

  ‘But you’re only a lodger here,’ a woman called out indignantly. ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘I like this square. I live here. I pay the rent. Isn’t that enough?’

  He stood there on the step, half-pleading, half-challenging, his big ears glowing pink in the early sunshine. Admittedly, he was a strange-looking person. Your heart went out to him. Caleb saw all the shortcomings of the world.

  ‘But you’re a foreigner,’ the same woman in the crowd protested – a scraggy woman whose life was not working out well. ‘We don’t know where you come from.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Caleb retorted. ‘We must all present a united front. We must make it clear that not only are these houses our homes, but it will be our way of life that will be destroyed if the square goes down. Then we shall all be dispersed to different parts of London. Could be you will be forced to live in the suburbs. How will you like that? You wouldn’t want to have to live in Walthamstow or Chingford, with the snobs, would you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a little flat with a bath room,’ said one frail old man, raising his hand to speak. The ex-sergeant answered him. ‘What’s wrong with my nice spotless bath place? It’s just you’re too
bone idle to visit it.’

  ‘Yeah! That’s right. We must not be bone idle,’ said Caleb. ‘We must do whatever we can. I have prepared a letter to the Finsbury council. I ask every one of you to sign it. What do you say?’

  ‘I’m not signing no letter to any bloody council,’ a youngish woman with red-dyed hair said. ‘They’d turn me out for a troublemaker.’

  ‘’Sides, they may put us up in a better place,’ said her mother who was standing next to her. ‘The housing here is a regular disgrace, that’s what it is.’

  There was a general murmur of agreement.

  ‘You’ve got to fight, you stupid lot!’ Caleb shouted. ‘If you don’t fight, you’ll simply find yourselves shovelled into an old folks’ home in no time – and it will serve you right! Do you want to die there, with a plate of porridge for breakfast and a matron standing over you with a whip?’

  ‘That’s no way to talk,’ said the ex-sergeant. ‘What are you, any road? A bloody Communist?’

  That was when they all started calling Caleb names.

  So the meeting broke up.

  Caleb then began to drink seriously, punitively. His brow became darker, his mood more sullen. The more he drank, the more he ranted. You knew he was a vegetarian; now meat-eating became another of the objections he had to the rest of humanity.

  ‘It’s not just fucking meat-eating; that’s a euphemism. You got to understand it, Steve.’ He wagged a finger at you.

  ‘You’ll dislocate that bloody thing if you keep shaking it like that.’

  ‘I’m telling you, chum, it’s killing animals. Murdering without thought. Hateful! Those poor placid things in fields – cows, sheep, pigs, ducks, whatever – they are just there waiting for some farmer to come along and kill them. Ever seen the fear in a cow’s eyes just before the chopper falls? No? Well I have.’

  He took a deep drink of his whisky, followed by a sip of beer. You always bought the cheapest stuff the Gardeners Arms could sell.

  He went on quietly. ‘That wise old crank, Thoreau, said that as the human race improved, it would slowly give up the bad habit of slaughtering and eating animals. The big mistake he made was to imagine the human race was going to improve. How does it improve? It gets worse … And the more of us there are, the larger the population grows, the more our nastiness grows. Like an infection.’