by Fay Weldon
Venetia: Daddy, Camberwell are giving me a joint show. Former pupils. Will you come to it?
Karl: No. Nothing good ever came out of Camberwell. Put that baby to bed and come up to the attic and see what I’m doing. Since I left your mother it’s all falling into place.
Venetia: The baby needs feeding,
Karl: It can wait.
He finds a baby’s bottle full of a browny-pink liquid and puts it in the baby’s mouth. The baby drinks and falls asleep.
Venetia: What’s that?
Karl: A herbal tea. Have some.
She says no, and then she drinks. He makes her some more. The baby is put to bed. They go up together to his attic which is full of paints and turpentine and paintings of Claire naked (he never painted me naked) and it’s as erotic as hell. She flatters him and tells him he’s better than Picasso and looks like Picasso too. It’s so cold they have to get under the old kelim carpet – worn so thin it can be used as a blanket. She tries to persuade him to come back to me, and he says if he was feeling warmer he might consider it, so she does what she can to warm him, and because she’s always wanted to since she was seven, and now she’s one up on me, isn’t she. And actually, oddly, now that’s out of their system, he does give it a go but I turn him away. He doesn’t come back to haunt me, more’s the pity, but the baby does.
But that’s enough of that. Why do I torment myself?
Action, Not Reflection
I shut up my laptop. I have put off life long enough, which is all writing is. I understand Venetia now: I don’t forgive her. I do not want to see her or think of her again. She is too like me: a girl with round heels (the ones who with just a push fall back upon a bed), in a state of acute denial; she does exactly what she wants while believing she is acting selflessly. Karl is mad, not bad, and uses ‘art’ in the same way, to justify his actions. If we all fell for it and suffered for it, more fool us. And besides, he is dead – as Venetia said to me of my father, when she was five, and I was trying to explain the concept of death – ‘Oh I see. One of those people who lived in the past.’ But all such charming memories have been rendered worthless. I would be quite happy to be the same: someone who lived in the past. But I do not have the tablets to hand to see to it.
I had a daughter, Venetia, who, in my absence, slipped in beside my husband and had a baby by him. She reared the baby as another man’s, under my nose, and hugged the guilty, joyous secret to herself. These are the facts of the matter. Forget governments, food shortages, kidnappings, CiviSecure and the like – they are what they are and change with the times – we could be living just as well through the Great Plague, or the Inquisition – the world outside the home composes just the frame for our lives, not the life itself. Me and mine have been betrayed by my daughter, this is the nub of the matter. All the rest is white noise.
I have no idea what the time is. I have no mobile, no clock. I listen. All is quiet next door. The space is empty. The armchair and its rolls of duct tape wait for a victim who perhaps will never come. I look out the back window. It’s dusk. The white potato flowers seem luminescent. I hope they have not been damaged by my curses. After all, what has changed? Ethan – my grandchild and stepchild both – is still the man he is, and not so interesting a human being, come to that. I have never been so attached to him as I have been to his brother Amos. I used to think that was because Ethan had inherited Victor’s scientific bent, but no. He just lacks the creative sensibility of the rest of the family. Though he is certainly not as bright as his half-brother Mervyn. Venetia was wasting her time. Though if Ethan and Amy were to have children – is it even possible that I misremember and Venetia was Terry’s child –
Women have a great propensity to forget what is inconvenient – namely, who exactly is the father of this baby kicking away in my tummy?
The song in my mind surfaces. ‘I Am My Own Grandpaw’ –
I was married to a widow, who was pretty as could be,
This widow had a grown-up daughter
Who had hair of red,
My father fell in love with her
And soon they too were wed,
This made my dad my son-in-law
And really changed my life –
I am my own grandpaw –
It really drives me wild.
I’ve probably got it a bit garbled. It just makes me laugh. If I were a young woman I would whirl around the room with the baby in my arms, dancing to the tune of the universe. I cannot dance but it doesn’t stop the tune. Nothing does. I forgive Venetia, who too is getting old.
I feel a change in the karmic weather. I feel the stillness after the storm. Everything waits. Something is about to happen. The universe slips.
The lights come on. The power cut is over. Mother, what would you say? ‘When in doubt, do what’s in front of you.’ Obediently I go to the computer and look up superglue in CiviPedia. Acetone. Nail varnish remover? I find I have some in a sponge bag of yesteryear, which should have been thrown out, but never was. The bag is full of loose unnamed pills and crusted unguents of which I no longer understand the usages. But here it is. Max Factor, very ancient, from my days with Edgar, but it should be okay. There is still some grappa left (CiviStore Grade 1: farewell to all that), which I hid from Edgar when he called to see me the other night, and I mix the two up – how does alcohol react with acetone? There is no steam, no bubbling, no explosion, it is okay. There is an eye-dropper in the sponge bag – I used to suffer from conjunctivitis. I use it to squirt the mixture into the keyhole. Surplus to requirements trickles down from the lock and makes bubbly runnels in the dark-blue paint. It is certainly strong stuff. I will leave the glue to soften. My mother would be proud of me.
Before long I will be able to get out of my house, and the runnels in the paint will confirm to me that these events happened and were not the product of an overheated imagination.
It is normal for the parents of girls lost to death or disaster to describe them thus: ‘she was such a lovely, bubbly girl, she had all her life ahead of her.’ I wonder who tells the poor stunned parents what to say? The doorstepping journalist, I suppose. ‘Shall we just describe her as bubbly? That seems to sum her up.’ Venetia was all kinds of things but she was never bubbly. Polly on the other hand bubbled and fizzed away.
There is a noise from the potato patch. I switch off the light and look out. There is something happening beneath the beanpole arch and just enough light to see movement and scuffles, a cluster of bodies. Someone is being frogmarched across the patch to the back of No. 7. There are muffled noises, protests. Whoever it is does not mean to go quietly. Victor? Whoever it is breaks away, bursting through the bean plants; it is hardly intelligent; wherever he runs he will see nothing but the backs of houses, boarded-up doors and barred windows. But he runs, trips, falls face first into the muddy soil of the mulched potatoes. A glint of metal from the ground – handcuffs? No wonder he fell. The others run after him and fall upon him, drag him to his feet, and under cover of the arch. They are so inept. If there is anyone left living in the Crescent – perhaps they have all gone, and in Rothwell Street too, which is why the CiviCams haven’t been mended – they will have been alerted. Though people are unwilling to call CiviSecure at the best of times. Wiser, when there is trouble, to look the other way.
‘Come on now, me boy, or it might be the worse for you.’
The stage-Irish accent of Henry, Ethan’s half-, no longer step-, brother, is recognizable, and Ethan’s grunt, and I pick out the odd oath from Amos, and Amy’s self-righteous squeak. And then they are inside.
I can no longer take any of them quite seriously. Henry is no new Oliver Cromwell come to rescue society from NUG, but an ill-informed redundant pig farmer in a world which has to live on reconstituted protein, rather than one which rings to the squeals and struggles of slaughtered, methane-producing pigs. He will find no followers.
Amos is a swearing, spoiled, stubbly druggie with too high an opinion of himself, envious of E
than and always happy to get him into trouble; and not particularly honest. There is nothing charismatic about him at all.
Ethan is the child of an incestuous relationship and I do not want to think about him.
Amy is no relative of mine, only of Liddy, whom I should have looked after better. She is plain and bossy. An unfortunate face, as my mother would have said. Polly would not let me even draw attention to such a fact. She would say that a woman’s looks have nothing to do with her personality. But then Polly is self-deluded and sees the world as it ought to be, not what it is.
In fact I have fallen out of love with my family, at any rate this generation of them. I have been shocked out of self-deception into clear thinking. Or perhaps I am being punished. Supposing I’d let Fay have Karl, out of kindness – but the divergence of the ways is too much to contemplate.
Vague noises come from next door. No screams of the tortured, thank God, just occasional bursts of speech and a rumbling of complaint. What can they want from Victor? Apologies? Money? Promises? If they know about the circumstances of Ethan’s birth, can they blackmail him? Unlikely; the press is too tightly controlled for that. Redpeace speculated about what Victor was involved in at NIFE, and was promptly taken off the web.
If I try the key in the lock again it may work. Then I could run out into the street – or at any rate hobble, and wave at the CiviCam and help would come. I could turn the lot of them in. It would be an act of a good citizen, and a bad wife and mother, and a shocking grandmother. Or I could sit here like any old person, neutral, do nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, and not try the key. I decide to do exactly that. When in doubt, do nothing.
I try a little National Meat Loaf – it’s marvellous how good it tastes. I am quite trembly. It has been something of a day and is not finished yet. Doors close and open upstairs and Amos comes leaping down. He seems cheerful, but he is acting.
A Useful Conversation With Amos
‘Just popped down to see you were okay, Gran,’ he says.
Just popped down to see you were still where you ought to be, is what he means. He rolls a joint.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Did a bit of writing, now it’s suppertime.’
‘Being old has its advantages,’ he says. ‘I guess everything gets a bit wiped out. But don’t mind Henry. He can come over a bit strong. He has his problems. We all do.’
One of them, I suspect, is that Henry doesn’t like Amos smoking spliffs so he has to come over to me to do it. The New Republic will be a very drug-free kind of place.
‘I didn’t notice,’ I say. ‘A very good-looking boy, that Henry, in spite of his mother.’
‘Gran, you really have to get over what happened fucking years ago.’
And he tells me everyone else has, and if his mother could accept Henry surely it was time I did too. Henry was a great leader and if I was sensible I should keep in with him. He was good to women and children. This was to be a bloodless coup. He’d promised to look after Venetia, even when Victor was in exile. Perhaps Venetia could come down and live with me, or with Polly. Henry was merciful, and didn’t believe in bloodshed. There’d been no-one like him since fucking Che Guevara.
I could see Henry would look good on a T-shirt. It was the jaw that did it. Henry’s jaw, Ethan’s jaw. I put out of my mind the possibility that Venetia had made the whole thing up to upset Polly, or Polly had, to upset me. No. It had happened.
But Victor go into exile? Where? St fucking Helena? They wouldn’t have the fuel to get him there. Men never have a satisfactory after-the-hostilities plan. They were all mad. What did they mean to do? Invade Muswell Hill? Men are even more given to pack behaviour than women. Show men a leader and they’ll follow. I laughed. And then I thought of the CiviSecure guards, the young hotheads, with their bright eyes and their nibbling teeth, and it didn’t seem too funny. I thought of the Jokers in their circle of torment and thought that Henry’s cheeks were looking rather suspiciously red. Had he wiped off the rouge? If he could rally them all – the hosts of unemployed young male teenagers – perhaps he already had – if forces within NUG were already conspiring against it – NUG, government by sociologists and therapists, wouldn’t stand a chance.
‘But tomorrow we’ll be through with the meetings,’ Amos assured me, ‘and your life will get back to normal. You can have anyone round here you like. Even your fascist ex-husband. You lost a fucking lot of sympathy when you married him.’
I asked, rather too sharply for the daft little old lady I was playing, whether Amy would be over to see to the lock. He looked blank. I mentioned the superglue and he said Amy and Ethan would be over to say goodbye tomorrow around midday, and no doubt they’d see to it then. Might not be too early because it was a big rally tonight.
‘A rally?’ I enquired. ‘What fun! Where?’
‘We’re packing the Underground trains,’ he said. ‘No cameras down there. They get vandalized.’
And he stumbled upstairs. I thought again of trying the lock and running out into the street to freedom, but I didn’t. I’m a family kind of person, and families have always stood between women and freedom. They connive at their own defeat.
Dr Yuk
I remembered what the loose pills were. Dexedrine. I’d emptied out their little brown bottle into the bottom of the sponge bag so nobody could identify them but me. They were illegal at the time. These days they would be in blister packs religiously stamped with date and strength: then they were anonymous, sinister in dark glass. These ones must be a good sixty years old, powdery but okay. Time would not have made much difference to their effectiveness. Amphetamine was a chemical.
I went carefully. I took only one. My chest is old-lady thin and I did not want to see or hear my heart pounding away. I felt no difference in my body, but I felt foolhardiness and good cheer enter into my mind. It was almost like the ‘walk-in’ my friend Ava in Glastonbury told me about, only her walk-in, a spirit from the Dog Star Sirius, wasn’t very nice at all. It had made her steal the ten-pound note I had put aside for a night’s lodging at the youth hostel. My walk-in was effective but not delinquent. Walk-ins make you do all kinds of things you wouldn’t normally do, she told me – steal, cheat, sleep with your best friend’s husband – possibly, even, your mother’s husband. Perhaps that had been Venetia’s problem? A walk-in, very useful to have around, but no use as a witness in a court of law. They evaporate when their existence is challenged. Nevertheless, naturally, they proliferate in Glastonbury and other fulcra of supposed spiritual power, where people are determined to do exactly as they please and still feel good about themselves.
The problem with Dexedrine is that while it gives you energy and speeds up your brain you feel like someone else. It was as someone else that I waited by the darkened window until the New Model Army had filed out, minus Victor. It seemed unlikely that they had left him without a guard, but when I got up to No. 5’s first floor – moving faster made the pain less, or at any rate go on for a shorter time – there was Victor, pink-faced, plump and bald, his clothes and face muddy from where he had fallen in the potato patch, hands and legs cuffed to the chair, tape round his mouth but his nostrils free to breathe. I have always wondered what happens when people to whom this happens have colds in the head. I suppose they simply die. Victor was snorting away, as it was.
My instinct was to give him more air, and I found a serrated kitchen knife and cut through the tape at a point where it pulled tight. I wondered whether killing him would serve any useful purpose, but I could not see that it would. Presumably the New Model Army had felt the same.
‘Not you too,’ he said. ‘Not you, Gran,’ which was oddly moving. Poor man, he wept.
I disclaimed responsibility. I apologized for my family’s behaviour. I told him what I did not believe: that they were motivated by a desire for the public good, and should be forgiven. Indignation made him more stoical.
‘But so are we all,’ he said.
Theirs was a properly elected governm
ent, not like the last one. NUG was determined to meet the nutritional needs of the people safely and fairly, and NIFE was doing everything in its power to provide the people with protein grown from basic meat cells other than human, but there were still technical difficulties to be overcome. And then his voice faded away as he listened to himself. The politician in him struggled with the person and the person won.
‘Bugger this,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to explain all this to an old woman. No offence, Gran, but just get me out of here.’
I did take some offence. There had been some talk over the last year of restricting the electorate to those between thirty and fifty, the one-person, one-vote principle being seen to be outmoded in an ageing population. The future was too precious to be trusted to a lot of daft old people with Alzheimer’s, or young hotheads. The talk had evaporated but prejudice against the old had observably increased.
I said I didn’t have the key. They were holding me prisoner too. But there was lots of time. They were off to a rally and wouldn’t be back until late. We would work out something. He suggested I start sawing away at the metal chain that joined the cuffs but I said it was CiviCutlery and would work for duct tape but hardly for metal. He sighed and said CiviCutlery had saved countless lives but he personally had made a stand against it. If people were not allowed to express a degree of aggression they would internalize it, and there might be civil unrest.
‘You were right,’ I said. ‘You should have talked more loudly. Then perhaps we wouldn’t be in here.’
Now he began to cry.
‘That snake in the grass, Henry. I did everything for him, for Venetia’s sake. When he turned up I took him into my household, the same way I took first Amos and then Ethan. I love Venetia; I love their mother, why do they seem to hate me?’
Victor had always known that Ethan was not his? I had to sit down to take this in. He had married a woman who had deliberately conceived a child by her own stepfather, and then foisted it on him? And he had gone along with it? And gone on loving her? The odd black eye seemed a trivial thing. Fact kept outstripping my imagination. I was too old for this. Should I retape his mouth, go downstairs, let what happened happen? Go to sleep and with any luck not wake up at all. Join my mother, be at peace. I had done my duty by Mother Nature: I had fed two children out into the world, with the unique genes she had insisted on in her quest for improvement, to add to the general mayhem of life.
