Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  ‘Perhaps it mounted the kerb by accident, and came back to make sure you were all right,’ I say, but my voice trails away. It’s a rather feeble voice these days at the best of times. And this was not the best of times.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she says. ‘I had the same “almost” feeling I had when I nearly fell under the train the other day. Almost dead. I can’t die. The girls need me. Do you think paranoia is inheritable?’

  ‘Yup,’ I say.

  ‘Because why would anyone run me down? It was an official car and should have been in the centre lane anyway. I expect the driver was drunk. Those Ministry drivers are famous; most of them are ex-bankers.’

  ‘Born for the thrill of the chase. Ethan is one. What did the driver look like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Polly. ‘But it was hardly likely to be Ethan. You can be very odd about your own flesh and blood, Mum.’

  ‘Polly,’ I say, ‘let’s just go and see Venetia now.’

  ‘You promise not to make fuss about Henry, or Dad, or anything like that?’

  I gritted my teeth – fortunately in the days of my wealth I had a lot of work done on my teeth – crowns, implants, and veneers aplenty – so I could grit them in confidence – and promised.

  Surprise

  It took some time to get up to Muswell Hill. There were roadblocks at Camden Town and Highgate, and Polly’s little CiviCar had trouble getting up the hill. Amos says that underpowering the CiviCar is done on purpose, to make driving so unpleasant people stop doing it, use the buses to get to work, if they have any, or otherwise just stay put and sleep like good citizens.

  I remember my mother saying that the streets were so quiet when she was a child because families had only one pair of shoes between them, and so stayed home. They couldn’t afford to leave the house. It is beginning to be the same now, but there are still enough cars for a tailback of miles up the Hampstead Road.

  ‘How’s the writing going?’ Polly asks, at Camden. The police were checking tyres.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say.

  ‘But will anything come of it?’ she asks.

  ‘Probably not,’ I say. ‘But it’s what I do.’

  ‘So what are you writing about?’ she asks, politely, but already bored.

  ‘It’s a fantasy about alternative universes,’ I say. ‘In which I didn’t marry your father but your Aunt Fay did, and had four sons.’

  ‘But if you hadn’t married him you wouldn’t have had me. You’re wishing me out of existence.’ She sounds quite hurt.

  ‘Yes, but then she divorces him and I marry him and have you.’

  ‘Is that legal? Marrying your sister-in-law? Surely not.’ She’s so literal.

  ‘In my alternative universe all things can happen,’ I say. ‘But actually no, I’m just teasing. What I’m really writing about is an elderly woman living alone whose house is taken over by an extremist terrorist gang who also happen to be family, so she’s torn.’

  ‘You wish,’ says Polly. She sits at the driving wheel and her jaw juts out and her little rosebud mouth is grim and who she reminds me of is Henry. But then she is his half-sister, so why should she not look like him?

  But if I’m right, and all this is something I wrote, my invention and not real, how do I know what the grown Henry looks like? I won’t have seen him since Karl came round to Chalcot Crescent when Henry was six weeks old. I wouldn’t let them in the door. Edgar was in bed upstairs, beneath the striped Arabian counterpane which had been at the cleaners when Karl came to do his fell sweep of our belongings.

  ‘What does Henry look like?’ I ask.

  ‘Very good-looking,’ says Polly. ‘Like a taller Mussolini with a big fascist jaw, but actually he is sweet.’

  Not good. I am too accurate for comfort. I want to get back into my home, and rewind the film of my life to the time I am having lunch with Amos, after which the day proceeds normally. With no bailiffs, no Redpeace meeting, no Ethan, Amy or Henry or Polly’s girls, no imprisonment and no escape. The trouble with escaping is that there has to be a return and if it’s true and not what I wrote, how am I going to get back in my own front door?

  I feel in my pocket and there is the key. That’s something.

  The real test will come of course when I stick it in the lock and see if it is indeed bunged up with superglue. If it is, then it is thanks to Amy, and my memory has not been playing tricks: the Redpeace plot exists. If the key turns easily and sweetly, then I am the victim of my own overheated imagination. Polly’s mention of the Mussolini jaw might just be a coincidence, a lucky strike on my part. Perhaps someone once described Polly as having such a jaw – which I suppose she has: but I would never be so unkind as to say so to her face – and I buried the memory until it surfaced in the fictional account of Redpeace’s intrusion into my life and home. Because after all if the shape of Polly’s jaw is dictated by the genes of her father’s line, then it might be true of Henry too. They are half-brother and half-sister, so it would be reasonable for my fictional Henry to have at least some resemblance to Polly. And yet, Occam’s razor. ‘One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.’ The easiest and simplest explanation is that what I remember happening, happened. In which case, how do I get back into my house?

  ‘Why doesn’t she just go to the police?’ Polly asks. ‘This woman in your book?’

  ‘She can’t go to the police, because this is now, and not the old days,’ I say. ‘She is frightened that if she does the police will take in perps and victims alike, put them in a van and disappear the lot of them. In these days of overpopulation, simply to be associated with trouble is enough. As the Catholics used to say when crusading against the Albigensians, “Kill them all: God will recognize his own.”’

  ‘You exaggerate,’ she says. ‘You’ve been talking to Amos. He’s such a conspiracy theorist.’

  The policeman lets us through. I will say this for NUG: teachers and those in reserved occupations get free car parts and her CiviCar has new tyres.

  A Flurry Of Slippages

  At the Highgate roadblock CiviSecure, in their smart brown Hugo Boss uniforms, are checking that diesel cars are not running on tax-free central heating oil. If they are, they will be confiscated, and the drivers turned out to find their own way home as best they can. CiviCars have no locks on their tanks, and Polly is worried because Jokers have been caught in the Mornington Crescent area; occasionally you hear strains of the old TV Batman theme drifting over the rooftops. To the Batmobile – let’s go! and then the durdurdurdur, durdurdurdur – broadcast from some high empty building, to be abruptly cut short as they pack up and leave before CiviSecure can get there.

  And very spooky it can feel, with no Batman and Robin to the rescue. The current fashion of these roaming gangs is to add heating oil to permitted diesel. They think it’s funny. Amos of course says it’s a scam and NUG employs the Jokers and provides the illegal oil, so as soon as a car gets on to the market it will be confiscated and up for resale again. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case. I can hardly believe the Jokers are organized to this extent. They work singly or in packs, young men and women who are outside the system and look for their entertainment – violent computer games and films being banned – by making a nuisance of themselves. They model themselves on Batman’s arch-enemy; they love chaos and destruction, finding it hysterically funny, and will disconcert passers-by, especially young girls, by suddenly revealing Joker lapel badges, which, when pressed, peal with maniacal laughter. Then they melt into the crowds. They used to wear rouge, but it made them too obvious so they stopped. Some say the old street gangs have simply united under a leader and evolved into the Jokers. NUG likes to blame them for the occasional dead body found in the street, the ransacking of a newspaper office, the odd knee-capping, but Amos of course says NUG is playing a double game, the Jokers are a useful scapegoat. He said as much at one Shabbat dinner and Victor almost conceded that it was
true.

  ‘The ends can justify the means,’ Victor said. ‘Justice sometimes needs to be silent, swift and sure. These days necessity rules.’

  ‘Necessity,’ said Amos, ‘when it’s not being the motherfucker of invention, is the excuse of tyrants and the creed of slaves.’

  Those Shabbat dinners were getting increasingly tetchy. I was not altogether sorry when the Friday night invitations ceased to be a matter of course, and became occasional. And Venetia, the loving and dutiful daughter, kept up her habit of bringing round goodies for her poor old mum. But naturally not mentioning the arrival of Henry on the scene. I could see how much the girls wanted me to be ‘civilized’ about Henry, and I could understand it in Polly, but why Venetia? I had brought her into my marriage with Karl: I should surely expect some loyalty when I took her out of it? Was she not my appurtenance? That is not in accordance with contemporary thinking, I know, when all emotion is meant to be mild and not raise the blood pressure – but if you can’t hate, how can you love?

  ‘I couldn’t bear to lose this car,’ says Polly, as we wait in the queue at Highgate. She’s nervous. She bites her nails. My fault. Everything that goes wrong with my children is my fault. She turns and smiles at me. She has a lovely smile, Karl’s smile.

  ‘At least,’ she says, ‘I have you with me. They’re not likely to turn you out into the cold. You’re an old lady. They may even recognize you.’

  My children delude themselves as to the power of fame and wealth. Both, though part of the outer landscape of their lives, which they see as permanent, are transitory. If I was recognized, which is unlikely – CiviSecure teams are composed mostly of school-leavers – I might well be on a list of undesirables. I talk too much, and so can only be a fifty-second wife. I am too old and add that to talkative and I’m in trouble. I have too much memory of the past. I look younger than my years, but even so, the Dignity CiviVan might arrive, the one rumoured to take the elderly off to the National Meat Loaf vats, whenever a new input of stem cells is required. I say as much to Polly and she looks at me in alarm.

  ‘Mum,’ she says, ‘there is no such rumour.’

  ‘Only kidding,’ I say, but now I have thought of it I can see it might well be true.

  I realize that this bout of trouble with what is truth and what is fiction, what true memory is and what false, started when I was sitting on the stairs with Amos. I had felt unreasonably happy, and the stillness, the sense of marvel, had descended. It was the slippage into an alternative universe, the same one I had felt up the alley kissing Venetia’s father: also the night I stole Karl from my sister Fay: the night I turned Karl and the baby Henry away: occassions when all life switched and split and went off in an alternative direction. I expect there was another one the day my mother decided to carry on with the pregnancy that was me. Somewhere there are other universes where I do not exist, or Venetia, or Polly, where Fay married Karl and had four sons. There are an infinite number of universes: too many to contemplate.

  The slippage I was conscious of yesterday was wavery – perhaps because I am getting too old for such events; they usually happen when people are young – perhaps because I write so much fiction, which is, after all, the creation of alternative universes by other means. Just as war is the continuation of revolution by other means. Either way, I would not be more certain of the universe that I was in. I only wish the slippage had happened before the bailiffs knocked upon the door and not after. I might find myself in one where all other things were the same, only I was not in debt; that would be really nice. I feel for the front door key in my pocket, to remind me that when I next use it, I will find which reality I inhabit.

  There was an old crone from the Crescent,

  Who said though I live in the present,

  I know more than I should

  About things bad and good,

  Which happened or otherwise didn’t.

  ‘Did you say something, Mum?’

  ‘No.’

  Polly bites too hard down on a fingernail and lets out a little cry of pain; the CiviCar edges forward a yard or two.

  ‘Polly,’ I say. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘It’s just I don’t think Venetia and Victor are getting on too well.’

  ‘But he adores her,’ I say.

  ‘That’s the myth,’ says Polly. ‘It suits us all. Actually he’s a fascist bastard and he beats her up. She’s not good enough for him any more.’

  Surprise, surprise. Another universe in which things turn out differently. I go cautiously into it. I must remember that Venetia and Polly are half-sisters and there will be envy and possibly false witness. Venetia seems to have everything. Money, power, acknowledgement as an artist even though she can’t paint for toffee, and by comparison Polly has so little. But if Venetia has an unhappy marriage and a brute of a husband, then that’s one up to Polly. And Venetia was always Karl’s favourite, and Polly felt it, and that won’t help.

  ‘Is that what she says or what you say?’ I ask.

  ‘Twice lately she’s had a black eye and twice she’s said she walked into a door. That could happen once but surely not twice.’

  ‘You’re not an artist,’ I say. ‘You don’t walk into doors but Venetia may well forget they are there.’ That hurts her. Poor Polly. She hates it when I bring up her general lack of aesthetic sensibility. Karl would complain that Polly had no taste, no awareness of her surroundings, which is why she could live in a dump in Mornington Crescent and not even notice.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you before,’ says my younger daughter, ‘because Venetia might not want you to know. You know how proud she is. She said Victor had changed. He wanted her to change too and to go on a diet and be more like Carla Bruni. Mum, she told me she was frightened of him. And she had this black eye. But Mum, we have to get her away from him. She could always go and stay with you. There’s no room in our flat.’

  ‘How convenient,’ I say, which is not at all nice of me, but I am upset.

  Nobody likes the bearer of bad news, and that for me, at the moment, is Polly. I have a lot invested in Victor and Venetia being happy together and not all of it fresh coffee. I had rather hoped I might stay with Venetia until Henry and his cohorts moved out. Revolutionary cells do move on, that’s the great thing about them: they’re so paranoiac they find it difficult to trust the ground beneath their feet for long. A couple of weeks and surely this nasty, unreal episode would be over. I could have asked Polly and Corey to take me in but I didn’t think I could stand the mess or the noise. As for Venetia moving in with me, it is out of the question; Amos has beaten her to my spare room, not to mention my top floors, forget the house next door. Venetia is going to have to stay where she is for the time being. I say as much to Polly.

  ‘Victor is very stressed at work, of course, and that never makes for matrimonial bliss,’ says Polly now. ‘It may just be a bad patch they’re going through.’

  If I’m not going to take Venetia in, Polly certainly doesn’t want to, so she’s already backing down. But that doesn’t mean that Victor hasn’t taken to beating Venetia up. What is this new universe I’m in, in which Victor is a monster?

  ‘Thank God Corey’s work leaves him time enough to look after his family,’ Polly goes on, smugly. And then she says that according to Amy the reason Victor is in a bad mood these days is because there’s a vacancy on the Prime Committee at NUG, and NIFE being such a power in the land, what with the National Meat Loaf, Victor just might be appointed to it, or he might not, so he’s tense.

  I am certainly being kept out of the loop. Whole tangles of loops forming and re-forming in front of my eyes and nothing I can do about it, just sit here in a traffic jam.

  ‘Like when Stalin, the country boy from Georgia, turned up to join Lenin and Trotsky,’ I say. ‘Did someone die to create this convenient vacancy?’

  ‘I think she said it was a heart attack,’ Polly says. Her usually confident teacherly ways have deserted her. We both wonder if this
new Victor is capable of murder.

  ‘People do die from heart attacks,’ I say briskly. ‘So now it’s Top Brass Number One, Top Brass Number Two, and our Victor, and if NUG is reviving the cult of personality, as the photoshoots suggest, Victor will be its figurehead and will have quite a lot to hide. His wife’s family can’t be a source of comfort to him. And now you’re going round saying to everyone he beats up his wife. Is this wise? NUGIntel is not going to like it. If you think strange men are trying to push you off Underground platforms and mow you down in cars, can you be surprised?’

  ‘There was only me and her in the room.’

  I wonder if she is telling the truth. I ask her which room and she said the new dream kitchen. I say, well, if that was the case it most certainly was not just her and Venetia in the room but NUGIntel too, the rooms being wired for sound, as all government offices were, so should we stop this conversation now?

  Polly says but we’re in the car, and I say, well, perhaps Amos is right and the Jokers are in the pay of NUG, and when they’re out contaminating the diesel they’re bugging the cars as well. Polly snorts and complains about my imagination. I say my imagination has paid her rent for long enough so let her not insult it and if I’ve learned one thing in a writer’s life, it’s that if you can invent something, someone, somewhere else, will actually be doing it. Salman Rushdie told me so.

  She looks at me and her face changes, and pales. She nods.

  ‘I’ve been stupid,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. She looks behind to see if she could reverse. I shake my head. That would make them even more interested. We must take our chances at the checkpoint.