A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  “What sort of ideas?”

  “Well … it might encourage them to be overfamiliar. They could see whether you like them or not.”

  So they wear dark glasses about the house. But even at the age of fourteen and fifteen Uncumber will often forget hers, or wear them pushed casually up onto her forehead, so that her eyes are exposed. This infuriates her father, and the first big rows of her increasingly stormy adolescence are over the dark glasses.

  “Slolloping about the house stark naked—it’s disgusting!” shouts her father.

  “Half naked,” corrects Uncumber. “They’re on my forehead.”

  “Put them on properly at once.”

  “I don’t see why I should wear stupid blinkers over my eyes just to please you!”

  “You’ll do what you’re told!”

  “I won’t!”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, my girl!”

  “Why don’t you take a shot of calmant if you don’t like it? Then you won’t mind about it any more.”

  “My God! You’re the one who should be taking the shots! You’re the one who’s causing the disturbance!”

  And snap, snap! They slam their switches down to shut each other off.

  She won’t take her medicine

  And this issue of the shots is another of the themes of her adolescence. She won’t take her Pax, or her Distractin, or any of the other calmants and hallucinogens which are necessary for laying the foundations of good health and building a sound character. It’s not really the principle she objects to. It’s just the phase she’s going through of rebelling against parental authority. Everyone has to go through it, of course, but it’s particularly violent in her case, because she won’t take the necessary medicaments to control it. It’s a vicious circle. And the further it goes, the more likely it becomes that she will be stuck with the forms of her rebellion. Long after the rebellion has finished she’ll go on refusing to take her medicaments and looking for outside reasons to justify her obstinacy.

  It’s scarcely necessary to say that Sulpice will take his shots. He soon learns the skill of maintaining himself in emotional equilibrium and of preparing himself for the various sessions of instruction, imagery, and individual psychic guidance which are available on the holovision and by which the human mind and character are developed.

  He is immensely gifted intellectually—naturally, since he treats himself with Intel and Concentrin and the rest. Over and over again he tries to catch Uncumber’s interest in the world which this opens up.

  “What I’m working on at the moment,” he tells her, “is hyperequality. Not the same as superidentity, of course! In fact one might say the two terms are starkly infraparallel! We use hyperequality to define the notion of zero-negative, which in turn gives us a zero-position defined by the series k1S(x—l), k2S(x2—l), k3S(x3—l) et cetera, where k remains marginally plasmatic….”

  But of course she can’t follow even these elementary moves. She still feels close to him, even in these moods of high intellectual dilation. She admires his ease and grace, his natural acceptance of life. But not even he can persuade her out of her rebelliousness.

  “Come on, Cumby!” he urges. “Take your shot. It’ll make you feel right inside, I promise you.”

  “I don’t want to feel right!” she argues. “I want to feel me!”

  “But, Cumby, I feel more me after I’ve taken my shots. Honestly.”

  “Look, I don’t want to feel more anything! I just want to feel the same!”

  “But, you don’t feel right inside now! You don’t, do you? Admit it.”

  Uncumber buries her face in the fountaining air. “Oh,” she moans, “why can’t everyone leave me alone?”

  “Oh, Cumby!” sighs Sulpice.

  She’s a difficult child, there’ll be no doubt about it. Her refusal to take her calmants will undoubtedly send up consumption by the rest of the family. Ridiculous that three people should have to keep dosing themselves just because the fourth one won’t. Even Great-Great-Grandfather will be driven out of their reception chambers by her behaviour.

  “Where have we gone wrong?” her parents will meditate as they sit late at night full of Meditatin, watching the meditation channels.

  She sulks while everyone is merry

  And here’s another way she upsets her parents—she won’t laugh when she’s supposed to. As the children get older they are expected to take part in their parents’ social occasions. When Pelagius and Dympna call, for example, Uncumber and Sulpice are no longer supposed to share a separate reception chamber with their children. They are expected to lie switched in with the adults, taking a little Socion and a little Hilarin, and laughing at the sort of things you laugh at after you’ve taken Socion and Hilarin.

  For instance, everyone laughs helplessly when Aelfric balances a Hilarin pill on the end of his nose and tries to jerk it into his mouth. Aelfric is always very amusing on these occasions. He knows a lot of tricks with pills that make everyone relax and laugh and get into the spirit of the occasion. And he has a lot of very celebrated jokes which never fail to entertain, such as getting up from his air couch, walking slowly and gravely round the holovision chamber in the middle of the room, and announcing, “I’m a man who likes to see a thing from all sides!” Or the one where he pulls a frightful face and says, “I’m just a plain man.” Everyone always laughs till he cries at these, of course, and by the time they see Aelfric getting ready to do the one where he puts his head under one of the food taps and says, “Food for thought,” they’re usually begging for mercy and gasping: “No, stop, stop!”

  Everyone except Uncumber. She won’t take her Socion and she won’t take her Hilarin, so—unbelievable as it seems to everyone else—she manages to sit through these performances with a straight face. Not even a straight face, in fact—she scowls. She finds something horrible about these occasions. Even when Pelagius says, as he usually does, “That reminds me of something, but I can’t remember what!” she doesn’t melt.

  At one of these parties they all turn on her. “Look at Cumby!” Her father gasps, pointing at her. “Have you ever seen such a look?” They all gaze at her in silence for a moment, their faces remote and speculative, walled off in their hilarity. Then gradually they start to laugh at her, until they all become more helpless than ever. Dympna falls off her couch onto the floor and lies there, her shoulderblades shaking spasmodically.

  “You pigs!” shouts Uncumber. “You disgusting pigs!”

  And that’s funnier than ever. The dark glasses slip down Frideswide’s nose and reveal her wet, closed eyes. Even Uncumber, with her famous libertarian attitude on dark glasses, is shocked by the sight. Someone will surely get rather seriously killed in this orgy, she thinks. The spasm will paralyse them; they will be unable to draw breath. She becomes frightened.

  “Stop! Stop!” she cries. They shake their heads, waving feeble fingers at her in lieu of speech.

  Uncumber is saved on this occasion because a grave-faced stranger suddenly manifests himself on the screen with a message for Aelfric, and everyone starts to laugh at this messenger instead. He wants Aelfric to make some urgent decisions on the situation which has emerged down in 471–533–902, where several thousand outside workers have rioted and fought a pitched battle with Kind People. Everyone sobs with laughter at this news. The man says there are at least fifty-three seriously dead—including twenty permanently so. “Don’t!” begs everyone. “It’s too funny! We can’t bear it!”

  Finally, his hands shaking with laughter, Aelfric takes down a syringe and injects himself with an emergency dose of Dehilarin and Judicor. The shaking stops almost immediately. He heaves a long, deep sigh. The merry creases round his mouth disappear, and a certain melancholy spreads across the visible parts of his face.

  “Just a moment,” he tells the messenger flatly. “I’ll switch these other people out of my chamber.”

  After he has adjudicated the 471–533–902 dispute, he takes another dose of
Hilarin and rejoins the party. Freshly charged, he makes such a noise that Uncumber can hear him through the wall, even though she has switched her own chamber off. There is no sound from the others; they must be too weary to laugh another syllable.

  Later, after the party is over, Sulpice looks in to say a last, yawning good night to her and finds her laughing helplessly all by herself.

  “What’s the trouble, Cumby?” he asks anxiously.

  “Oh, Sulpy!” she gasps. “I felt so depressed that I took—I took—I took—”

  But she can’t get the words out for laughing.

  “You took some Hilarin?” asks Sulpice, astonished. “You didn’t, Cumby!”

  She nods silently.

  “But why now? After everyone’s gone home?”

  There is no sound from Uncumber except a faint, high, intermittent squeaking.

  “Oh, Cumby!” says Sulpice, sighing.

  How it was in days gone by

  Sometimes her father will try to reason with her.

  “Look, you don’t know how lucky you are! If you’d been born in days gone by instead of now, your life would be very different, I can tell you!

  “In those days everyone had to go outside—even the inside classes! People lived in one place and worked in another. And to get from the house where they lived to the house where they worked they had to go out in the air—thousands of them, millions of them, all brushing against each other and breathing in each other’s faces! And they packed together in communal travelling houses, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest.

  “They did almost everything communally. They ate in crowds, worked in crowds, relaxed in crowds. Almost everywhere you went, you found yourself in the actual physical presence of other human beings. That’s the literal truth, Cumby. I’m not telling you stories.

  “Well, of course, they were rained on. And burnt by the sun, which was very strong in those days. And they were struck by lightning. And of course the contaminated air outside carried diseases; in those days people used to breathe in disease with every breath. And then naturally they’d pass the disease on to everyone around them, by touching them, or breathing over them. Everyone was diseased then, for at least a part of every year—diseased in the nose, so they couldn’t breathe properly; diseased in the throat, so they couldn’t swallow; diseased in the stomach, so they couldn’t digest; diseased in the head, so they couldn’t think.

  “And they were minced up by their travelling houses—crushed to death by the dozen inside them, ground up beneath them. You have to learn these things, Cumby. That’s what it was like then. Even small children had to go outside and breathe the unfiltered air and mix with people they didn’t like.

  “They lived like animals; they behaved like animals. There was anarchy! But the reaction to anarchy was even worse. The most stringent order had to be imposed upon people, just so that they could survive their proximity. Society had to be arranged in strict hierarchical patterns, with powerful controls and sanctions. So that, when people looked into the future, all they could foresee was the necessity for stricter and stricter social order, imposed by ever more powerful central authorities, through ever more far-reaching controls. One day, they feared, every aspect of human behaviour would be controlled by some central authority. Nothing would be private, not even people’s thoughts. The whole of life would become public and communal. Freedom would vanish entirely.

  “Well, of course, what in fact happened was exactly the opposite. Everything became private. People recognized the corruption of indiscriminate human contact, and one by one they withdrew from it. Whoever could afford it built a wall around himself and his family to keep out society and its demands. Gradually, as people’s technological skills improved, the walls they built became more and more impenetrable. One by one the chinks which they were forced to leave in the fortifications in order to export their skills and import the necessities of life were closed up. All over the world each family with the intelligence and energy to manage it gradually created its own individual controlled environment. Each family built its own castle, into which nothing, whether food, air, information, or emotion, was admitted until it had been purified and sterilized to suit the occupiers’ needs.

  “So we built the outer walls of our castles. And inside them we built inner walls to protect each member of the family from the proximity of the others.

  “But, as we discovered, there were certain unwelcome intruders which seeped through all these defences. Uncertainty, discontent, anger, melancholy—neither filters nor electronic devices could keep them out. So we learnt to construct certain chemical screens inside our own bodies, and to retire behind them to an inner keep where everything was under our control.

  “And in that inner keep, Cumby, we enjoy the perfect freedom which men have always dreamt of. What crippled and cut short all man’s earlier experiments in freedom is that they were public; and the public freedom of one man must necessarily impinge upon the public freedom of others; so that public freedoms inevitably limit and destroy each other. But our modern private freedoms impinge upon no one and nothing. And no one and nothing can impinge upon them. Even death, the last and most inexorable invader of our privacy, is being driven back step by step.

  “And that, Cumby, is why you’ve got to do what you’re told, and wear your dark glasses and take your pills—so that you can preserve the precious liberty that mankind has so slowly and so laboriously evolved.”

  Uncumber will listen to all this in silence—scowling, no doubt, but attentive. One small point, however, will worry her.

  “What about the outside people?” she will say. “How are they perfectly free, if they’re outside this controlled environment?”

  Aelfric will sigh with exasperation. “For heaven’s sake, Cumby! They’re not the same as us at all. They’re entirely different.”

  Waste

  Uncumber thinks a good deal about those frightening times past when the sky was not grey but blue, and when the sun was too bright to have any colour at all—when it fired dry grass, parched whole tracts of the earth, and burned holes in the retinas of anyone who looked at it. Terrible times, when the world’s population staggered thirst-racked through the desert lands, clutching their sun-blinded eyes!

  The sun looked then, in fact, as it looks now from the orbiting satellite cities above the earth. But the scattered waste-products of those cities have now, mercifully, dimmed the glare for those below. The sun’s light is filtered through a blanket of combustion products mixed with atomized excrement, abandoned packaging materials, broken parts, and the unrecovered corpses of people killed in the various major satellite disasters. From this detritosphere a gradual slow precipitation occurs, as the particles sink into a descending orbit. The heavier items accelerate and burn up. The smaller particles fall slowly as a fine dust over the whole surface of the globe.

  The topside of the detritosphere is beautiful, as everyone knows from watching the manifestations of it on holovision. For hours at a time the eidetic channels show the changing patterns which the sun makes on it—foaming billows, purple in their shadowy depths, red and gold at their iridescent crests—individual pieces of dirty bathwater breaking into irregular fragments, each fragment full of silver light, full of golden light, full of the entire visible spectrum. It’s the aesthetic experience which everyone can enjoy, as the countryside once used to be. They watch it with a shot of the appropriate hallucinogen inside them, and marvel over it, and secretly try to compose poems about it.

  Uncumber’s unmedicated melancholy makes her scornful of such commonplace prettinesses. She prefers to let her mind run upon the grey underside of the detritosphere, and the great waste-grounds on the earth below, where the various radioactive waste-products are taken to be dumped and burned under insulating strata of mining spoil, ash, slag, and sewage. Barren deserts, stretching rawly grey for hundreds of miles. She yearns to visit them and to mope wanly about them. She feels that it would be sweet to be contaminated with their r
adioactivity and to decay with them in the pale yellow light.

  The romanticism of her adolescence, in fact, is the romanticism of waste and decay. She is almost physically conscious of the energy being sucked out of the energy-bearing materials of the universe, and of the gradual conversion of the whole structure to exhausted sludge. She feels the process working in her—feels that her life is essentially tragic.

  She thinks of those family holidays beneath a blazing sun and a brilliant blue sky. How humiliating to think that she once believed in them—believed they were manifestations of some actual beach, beneath an actual sun and an actual sky! Only a child would be taken in by such obvious fictions, of course. But what about all the other manifestations of the outside world which even adults accept as true? How can you believe in anything you see? For all anyone knows, it is all simulated somewhere, just like the holiday scenes.

  She laughs bitterly at her family, to think of them being taken in by this world of appearances; bursts into tears easily; seems more secretive and remote than ever. She needs a friend to confide in. But her old friend Rhipsime wouldn’t understand thoughts like these at all. And how do you find a new friend when you never meet anyone?

  She should advertise for someone

  And this will be a difficulty. The communications system of the inside world will be highly selective. One will on the whole see only people one intends to see, and since one can scarcely intend to see people of whose existence one is unaware, one will in effect see only people one knows already.

  Of course, there are exceptions. New faces will manifest themselves in one’s reception chamber from time to time—samplers collecting direct sample votes on proposed legislation, supply directors soliciting instructions for future deliveries of goods. Uncumber’s friend Rhipsime claims she has seduced three of these callers. There’s nothing more natural, she says; they expect it, think of it as part of the job. Uncumber is appalled by the idea. To her, all these official visitors seem far too finished, too word-perfect, too faultlessly armoured, as they smile impersonally from behind their stylish dark glasses. She can no more understand Rhipsime than Rhipsime can understand her.