by Dave Wallis
“Everywhere in the world the cities have a higher rate of people taking the old emergency exit than the countryside. Four times as many between forty-five and fifty-five do it as do young adults. All over the world the ratio of murder to suicide varies from 2 to 25 times, but everywhere it is in inverse proportion; the more murders the less suicide. Seems to suggest the same motive – vengeance on yourself or on another. Don’t do it, chums, get in touch with your nearest Alf Neighbour Help Centre first. The addresses are printed on page three. If you can’t face it any longer then write to me, chums. Write to me I beg you.
“So does the dynamic and controversial Bishop of Stockton, as you can read on page five of today’s issue . . .”
The gang met in The Tropic Night. “What’s ‘ratio’ mean, Kathy?” asked Ernie Wilson. He asked her things he would never ask a teacher. She explained. “Oh,” said Ernie. “Like how the price shortens or gets longer when the form of a horse changes or the bets lay different.”
“Exactly,” said Kathy.
“You know what I think?” said Charlie Burroughs, casually adjusting the folds of his camel-hair shorty overcoat draped around the chrome and plastic perch, “I think the squares is just giving up. I mean they never seemed to get any kick out of anything, just beer and pools and telly and peasant-type pleasures like that.” He paused because Kathy’s clear, grey eyes were looking at him as if she both wanted to reveal and hide something.
“Go on,” said Ernie, who had slid off his stool and was ducking and weaving about to the thumping of the juke-box, like a balletic shadow boxer, “go on, we’re all ears.”
Kathy had not meant to put Charlie off his stroke. She could never hear his voice now without suddenly seeing a glimpse of his white thighs with the strips of jeans pasted to them by blood and rain, as he walked, disdaining help, back to the bikes on the night of the Windsor bundle. He never spoke about the fight, but Ernie was always going on about how stiff he felt and what he’d do to them all when he went back with a good gang.
“Well,” Charlie Burroughs continued, “I think they’re just giving up all round, now. They gave up trying to boss us around any more.” The gang nodded hard because this statement was so regrettably not true. “They couldn’t be bothered to try and get with it. Now they all can’t be bothered with anything at all.”
“It must take some guts to do it, all the same,” said the gangling Robert Sendell. He was not really accepted in this crowd and only suffered the humiliations it inflicted upon him because it gave proximity to Kathy, who ignored him.
“Why worry about them?” said Ernie. “There’s only Charlie’s mother done it out of our gang.”
“That’s because you’re such good boys and girls,” said Charlie.
“Done it yet, you mean,” said Kathy.
“My dad says it’s never the higher-ups that do it. They got too much to lose and they’re never bored with their work, at least not for nine hours a day.”
“My dad’s on short time,” said Kathy. “People aren’t buying tellies these days.”
“Sign of the times,” said Charlie Burroughs, stretching out one tight-trousered leg and squinting at his pointed toe-cap which he then polished on the back of his other calf.
Kathy had a sudden memory of her father coming in, hanging up his coat and saying, “short-time”, to her mother. Nothing more, just the two words and how her mother had looked at him and they had both nodded.
“Be like old times,” was all her mother had said and when she asked them what she meant they only said, “Not to worry, not to worry, Kath.” She loved them very much but they would treat her as if she was still a little girl.
“All right for you,” she snapped unexpectedly at Charlie. “It’s not your dad.”
He flushed, “If you want to know, my dad’s not working at all . . . But he’s trying to get taken on at the power station. There’s so many done it there that they’re short-handed. That’s why there was that power-cut the other afternoon.”
“They’re cutting the bus and tube schedules for the same reason,” stammered Robert Sendell. From kindness Kathy looked at him with a pretence of interest but Ernie feinted a blow at him and said, “That’s nothing new.” He paused and put on his film-imitation Bronx-Jewish voice, “Hey, maybe that’s it. The cause of the whole thing. The squares just couldn’t take it waiting for buses anymore. How’s that for a theory? They’ll have me in the Church Youth Club Debating Society yet. . . .”
“So far they won’t even have you in the club,” said Charlie.
“That’s not fair,” said Kathy. “He’s not asked to join.” She did not like things which were not fair. “Seriously though,” she went on, “What is happening? why are they doing it?”
“I told you. They got fed up of standing in bus queues.”
“They’re all just not with it.”
“They got fed up telling us to believe things they didn’t believe themselves, like in God and ‘Honesty is the best policy’ and all that.”
“You drove that Tellen to it, going on about his hat. Must’ve hurt his feelings.”
“Stop it, this is serious.”
“Nothing’s serious.”
“It’s because they got too serious that they’ve started doing it, in my opinion.” This was Robert Sendell.
“Nobody’s asked your opinion,” said Ernie.
“Stop it, that’s not fair. He’s entitled to speak his mind,” said Kathy.
This started someone humming the introductory tune to the telly feature, “Your Neighbour’s Opinion”, in which Alf Neighbour brought together people who disagreed violently on some topical inessential. This then led them to start chanting the signature music to other serials and shows and the subject dropped.
After another hour they drifted towards their home streets. Tall blocks of flats lifted a cubist pattern of lighted windows against a black background of lowering clouds. All the curtains were drawn. People kept themselves to themselves and talked over the news. Outside Kathy’s buildings dwellers leaned out, in spite of the cold, and a small group gathered around the doorway while two policemen stood with their backs to them. A long white ambulance nuzzled the curb, its doors gaping back at the crowd and shamelessly revealing bright red blankets and white paint lit by a bare blue bulb.
A tingle of fear pricked at Kathy’s heart and she started to run. The lift was full or stuck of course. She ran up four flights, stopped gasping, took off her hobbling high-heel shoes and ran up another two.
“It’s not at our door,” she thought as she turned the corner but she was only trying to deceive herself with some trick of sight line. Dizzy and with her chest bursting, she pushed into the familiar hall. Someone said, “It’s the daughter, it’s all right.” And Mrs. Brown from underneath who was always complaining that the pop discs on her record player were too loud said, “Go to your mother, dear,” and “I’ve made some tea, both of you put plenty of sugar in it.” What on earth was she talking about?
Her mother’s face, very white and tight and her eyes darker than usual and unblinking, seemed hard and fixed in the centre of a moving mass of strangers and neighbours.
“Oh, Kathy,” she said, “Where you been? We was looking everywhere,” and then, in quite a sharp voice, “He had no business to do it. And you still at school. . . .”
Much later when all was quiet and everybody gone they both cried. Her mother said, “He shouldn’t’ve done it, Kath. We been through ten times worse than a bit of short-time together. Of course we were young then, makes a difference. He was feeling old. What did he suppose I was feeling?”
Kathy interrupted, “Don’t you do it!”
“Not likely,” said her mother. “There seems to be more men going out than us anyway.”
“Four to five times as many is the usual rate,” said Kathy who had been consulting medical reference books in preparation for a school debate.
Mrs. Williams led her daughter on to further ge
neralisation and asked the right questions whilst her mind stayed with her husband, lying alone among strangers in some cold tiled place.
They tidied the flat together, feeling the need for some familiar physical task, as a cat will sit and calmly wash itself after the shock of a narrow escape. Later Kathy indexed all her pop discs and put ink stars beside the titles of the ones she liked best and her mother sat and knitted. It was a strange vigil and there was a feeling about it of impending disaster as if they expected the suicide of a father and a husband still to come.
A change came over the evenings of the gang. First coffee and then sugar was in short supply and the cakes were always stale. Petrol was rationed and a black market grew up in nylon stockings, leather shoes and tyres.
All this made them too restless to sit around in the Tropic Night. At the corner of the street there were always army lorries of the Disposal Sections passing, sometimes a square even rushed out and lay down in the way of a bus there and then, in front of everyone. All the oldies wouldn’t talk about “The Crisis” as it had come to be called. The more conspicuous the signs of The Crisis the more it became impolite to mention them. The gap in the generations became even wider because young people on the contrary were always talking about suicide and saying, “Go and do it,” to bus-conductors, teachers, policemen or shop-keepers who had a brush with them. The phrase came to replace “Drop dead!” which had been all the rage in similar circumstances in the days “before the crisis” or “when rates were normal”, as another euphemism of the time had it.
The roads were emptying in the evenings. The law-abiding squares saved their petrol for essential journeys. Whole stretches of highway came to be taken over for scooter and motor-bike races between organised gangs. There were regular times and days and almost a fixture list. The patrol cars of the surviving policemen ignored the problem. As Charlie Burroughs reported, “One of them said to me, ‘If you youngsters kill yourselves off on the roads it’ll help to keep the balance right. That’s the way we look at it.’ ”
Ernie Wilson took the leadership of a new gang made up of a few of the former school crowd and many who had taken either to casual work or some thieving and marketing of articles in short supply, and living in one of the empty houses or flats of people who had done it. The Disposal Squads were empowered to stick a seal on the door in cases where no surviving relative could be traced, and then to notify the Control Board; but what happened after that took place entirely within their files and those of the departments to whom they wrote. The dwellings themselves remained empty under the settling dust, mostly still smelling slightly of gas, and it was an easy matter to break in and occupy one.
“Come round to my place,” said Ernie, “my new place. Very snazzy. There’s chairs and a long couch covered in real white leather, not plastic. I got all the slights and power going again too. I ran a flex right up from the basement. We’ll get some bottles on the way.”
They piled on to scooters and bikes and into a minibus. The bottom had fallen out of the used car market and several dealers had taken to permanent retirement by way of gin and exhaust fumes for the old, “pre-crisis”, reason of bankruptcy.
Ernie’s new place was a converted mews in what had once been the lushest part of Chelsea, near Paradise Walk and Flood Street. “Oh, look! It’s true about the chairs,” said Kathy.
“You think I tell lies or something?” growled Ernie.
“No, of course not. I was just admiring them,” said Kathy, taken for a moment off balance. It was the first time she’d noticed him caring what anybody thought, especially a girl.
The pop discs and twist tunes thudded and moaned. They rolled up a thick carpet and danced. Outside a west wind from up the river sighed around the deserted mansions and blocks of flats. People with money were leaving London, as they had once fled the plague and the bombs, because the proportion killing themselves remained lower in the countryside. In the lighted flat, however, the warm rigadoons and roundelays of the age went on. The girls took off their shoes and the boys their jackets. The jugs of cider and bottles of beer were drunk and spilt. When they were tired they ate cold baked beans from a stack of tins Ernie had carried up there from the stock of a storekeeper who’d done it last week. Then they paired off. A few boys, left out in the mating musical-chairs, took a last drink and slouched off into the silent streets in search of another party.
Ernie sought out Kathy. There was something to being picked by the gang leader. Amid all the soft rustlings in the darkened rooms these two moved with an imperial indifference to an inner bedroom. “What a smashing carpet,” said Kathy. “Who was this man before he did it?”
Ernie grunted. He was busy fumbling at her blouse buttons and bra. He had a crude, unthinking boldness which appealed to her. In these insecure times he was predictable. She liked, however, to keep up a chatter about other and unimportant matters during all the preliminaries. No endearments were ever exchanged between them.
“He was an architect. He owned a small sailing boat and one week-end he loaded it up with some grub and a crate of brandy and just sailed off. Certainly a new way of doing it.”
“Waiting for the week-end. That’s what makes it so typical of them,” said Kathy. She was now naked except for her briefs and she undid his shirt and snuggled up to him, still talking of inconsequential matters until, moments later, she sighed and caught her breath.
A pale grey beam of early Spring sunlight trickled into the rooms and between ten and eleven in the morning the couples stirred themselves. The boys splashed water on their eyes and shaved demonstratively whilst the girls did their hair for half an hour or so. “There’s plenty of mirrors,” said Kathy. “That’s the best of these lush places.”
The carpet was stained by crushed baked beans and spilt beer. It was no longer possible to walk to the kitchen sink without grinding through a shingle of broken cups and plates. The last towel, used that morning, joined a pile soddenly matting the tiled floor.
Ernie, rubbing his eyes and miming the action of a cowboy ruefully scraping the back of his hand over a stubbly chin, wandered into the main room. “Mind the discs,” yelled one of his guests. Ernie’s heels crunched a slithering pile of E.P. pops. He turned the accident to an act of bravado and kicked the debris aside.
“Oh, Ernie,” said Kathy.
“What’re you going on about? Don’t like the mess? Look at the mess in the place, look at that carpet.”
One or two of the weaker boys and girls started sheepishly to slide some of the bottles and disc fragments under the couch.
Ernie suddenly laughed. “You know what? It’s time I had a new place. Let’s do this one up and then scram.”
They set to work to the tune of one unbroken disc, “Ladi-doo, Lovely you.” First they took every plate, cup, ornament and vase and cracked them down in a heap on the bean- and beer-stained carpet. The boys tried their strength on the furniture and acquired clubs and hammers of chair legs and splintered table tops with which to smash and grind up the glazed pictures. Ernie burnt his initials with a cigarette end on the back of one of the white leather couches, and misliking the result, fetched a carving knife and slashed all the covers.
The curtains were pulled down and the windows shattered. Everything went to join the heap in the middle of the rug. They tried to set fire to it all but the pile only smouldered slightly and choked them with the smoke of scorching carpet and materials.
Then they stopped and left. “Well,” said Ernie. “He done hi’self and now we done his place for him.”
Panting they surged down to the street and the chilly damp forenoon air rasped their warm young lungs.
Ernie had taken over the suicide’s car with the flat. He jerked his thumb authoritatively at Charlie who had one of the prettiest girls still clinging, not wholly satiated, to his arm. “In the back.” He then palmed his hand at Kathy and they both got in the front.
Driving in Central London was almost as dangerou
s as it had ever been. Nobody cared what happened. The requisitioned buses of the Disposal Section took corners blind, swerved to the wrong side of the road to pick up some gassed body or other and swayed on their overladen way. A small section of the English had, in any case, always regarded the car as a legitimate means of self-disposal; it had made it difficult for the coroners and actuaries to prove intent. It needed only a slight tipping of the balance for the streets to seem full of madmen out to provoke a head-on crash.
By sharp braking, mounting the kerb, swinging across the road, Ernie kept them moving. Soon their home streets, marked out with unemptied dustbins and broken windows, closed about them.
Two Disposal Section buses lurched down Kathy’s road. “They’re takin’ ’em off to the quarries,” said Charlie.
“What quarries?”
“It’s where they dump them these days. Then they blast rock over them and they got a priest there says some prayers. We found it by accident out on the bike one day and some Control Board coppers chased us off.”
Kathy said, “What’ll happen when they get too many? I mean the Disposal Sections are all squares. Suppose they start doing it too?”
“Then we have to start bulldozing them into the quarries ourselves.”
“Catch me! Let them rot where they drop.”
“Make it unhealthy for us too. We’d have to scrape the lot of them out of the Smoke somehow. This is where all the tinned stuff is and there’ll be nothing else the way things are going.”
“What happens when the tinned stuff’s all gone?”
The question hung unanswered in the car like a cold draught from the empty streets outside.
In those days, before the death of the last square, gangs on the riot or rampage still drifted, at the end, back to their homes. It was only later that they learnt to stop and explore any likely house or block of flats wherever they might be when the need for shelter fell upon them. Thus Charlie’s girl was dropped at her corner and the rest went on to Kathy’s flat. Everything seemed clean and close and smaller than in the slaughtered apartment they had just left.
