The One Safe Place

by Ramsey Campbell

  Only his eyes were moving in his round stubble-topped face. Their darting halted as he flung out his right hand. "Yes, there, no, girl at the back."

  It was Rachel, one of Susanne's students, for whom a technician was fishing with a microphone. "I don't know what people watching films on satellite has to do with me and my friends being afraid to go out at night," Rachel said. "I should think they'd be home watching them."

  "Right, too busy watching to commit violence, lady with her hand up?"

  "Ever been raped? You wouldn't say that if you'd been raped."

  "I still might if it was true, I hope," Rachel said mildly as another woman shouted, "What about being afraid to stay in? Half the violence is in the home, only they don't want the public knowing."

  "Don't all talk at once or we won't hear you. Suppressing evidence of domestic violence. Who are you saying does that?"

  "Who do you think? This government that wants the family to be the answer to everything."

  "Family answer to everything. Who else believes violence starts at home? Yes, social worker there."

  "All the violent criminals I've come in contact with were brutalised at home. In Sweden it's an offence to strike a child, and if we want to break the cycle of violence—"

  Uproar greeted this. Susanne made out shouts of "Show me anybody it ever did a bit of harm" and "I'd do more than strike some of them." The presenter ranged back and forth in front of the audience, shouting, "Whoa, whoa" and trying to conceal his delight. "Make punishing children illegal," he said as the noise subsided into incoherence. "Is that the answer, yes, with the moustache?"

  "I didn't say—" the social worker protested, but the man called upon to speak was louder. "Anyone who commits violence is a coward. What they need is some violence done to them."

  "But then what would that make the doer?"

  So said Liu, another student of Susanne's, infuriating the previous speaker. "That's the kind of rubbish that gets police killed on the streets. We should give them all the weapons they need, and teachers while we're at it."

  "Arm police and teachers. Yes, no, next to you, T-shirt?"

  "If a teacher thumped me I'd just go and thump someone else."

  "Yes, you and your friends go in for that, don't you? I'll come back to you, but teachers teaching violence, anyone? Back row, you've had your hand up for a good bit?"

  "I hope everyone knows it's being taught as a subject right here in Manchester."

  "Violence on the curriculum. Yes, now where is she? Some people would say you're inviting more violence by teaching it."

  Though he had been gazing at Susanne for some moments, it had taken her that long to realise he hadn't mistaken her for someone else. "Let's make it clear I teach at the University," she said.

  "Yeh-yeh-yeh," the presenter said rapidly, sounding like an imitation of a dog at the end of a run, "but violence."

  "Well, I think we need to distinguish between representation and reality. In my course we look at depictions of violence in prose and film."

  "Why look at it at all?" shouted the woman who had raised the subject of the course.

  "As long as our culture produces images of violence, I think it's important to understand how they're consumed and what they signify."

  "That's not culture. That's not what we sent our Elaine to university for."

  The presenter held up one hand like a traffic cop toward the woman and bowed at Susanne. "You're saying you don't enjoy it, it's just an academic subject."

  "I wouldn't say that academic subjects shouldn't be enjoyable. Sure I enjoy some depictions of violence," she said, raising her voice as a mutter of dissatisfaction from various areas behind her turned into a jeer. "Part of the point of the course is to look at what our enjoyment involves."

  "We don't need professors to tell us that," a man yelled.

  "Specially not a Yank."

  "Are we being expected to pay her wages?" a third wanted to know.

  "We want violence stopped and you're making a living out of it," Elaine's mother shouted. "Ban it all and we might get somewhere."

  "Don't tell us nobody's proved a connection. It all ought to be banned in case there is."

  "If we aren't sure what effects it has," Susanne said, "isn't it possible that trying to suppress something that's so much a part of our culture might be more dangerous?"

  "Leave it in case we make it worse. Anyone agree with that? Yes, no, third row, no, you're fourth, yes?"

  "Mom, that wasn't what you said."

  "Maybe I've said enough," Susanne murmured, failing to catch the response the presenter provoked. "Anyone else?" he urged. "Lady's daughter there?"

  "I was just wondering," Elaine said in the somewhat strident voice that meant she'd had to persuade herself to speak up, "if anyone's done any research into the effects of programs like this."

  "If we ever do a show on it we'll have you on. Violence, though, any thoughts?"

  "That's what I was trying to get at. I can't see what you setting people at each other like this achieves except making them angry, which is on the way to violence, and people watching at home as well."

  "I'm the real cause of violence. Well, that's a new one. Any takers? Yes, we haven't been hearing much from that side?"

  "You just want to let ordinary folk be heard."

  Susanne couldn't decide if that was intended as praise or complaint. "Democracy's the name," the presenter said, and was leaning toward the next speaker when a small woman who looked squashed by her brim-less mauve hat and its burden of pins appeared at the end of the front row and stumped toward Susanne. "I'll say this to you in front of all these people," she declared as she came. "You infect our Elaine with any more of that stuff and I'm telling you, I'll split you from gob to navel."

  Susanne's instinct was to laugh or to say "That's colourful," but those were only ways of delaying her sense of shock. "Can we keep our seats, please," the presenter said, though failing to direct the microphone away from Susanne and Mrs. Nash, and then Marshall intervened. "You oughtn't to say that. My mom doesn't infect anyone."

  "They're just turns of phrase, honey," Susanne assured him, but Mrs. Nash turned on him. "What are you supposed to be doing here? What's any of this got to do with a kiddie of how old?"

  "Twelve," Marshall said with injured pride.

  "Pull the other one, love." Mrs. Nash peered narrowly at him. "Your mother never lets you watch those films, does she?"

  "I'm allowed to see films in America I can't see here."

  "That's no answer. All right, keep your hair on, I'm sitting down." Mrs. Nash appeared to be proposing to do so on the floor as she stooped to push her face into Susanne's. "Take yourself and your violence back where you came from," she said, and stumped off.

  Susanne was tugging her skirt down again, though the gesture made her feel no less assaulted, and wishing the cameras away when the presenter said to Marshall, "Just clear up a point for me. Who lets you see films in America?"

  "The state, I guess. Just because it's rated R doesn't mean you have to be seventeen to see it, but here it's rated eighteen and I'm supposed to wait six years before I can watch it again."

  He was talking about an action movie which he'd seen with Don in Florida. "No age restrictions on what you can see and read in America," the presenter interpreted him as having said. "Any comments? Yes, with the glasses, no, the other glasses?"

  "Of course there are restrictions," Susanne said, but the microphone had found a woman saying, "All commercial films are an act of male violence. Just look at the titles. They even call cinemas Cannon."

  "If we're going to sit here chunnering about films all night," a man on the front row said in a tone as plain and blunt as his face, "I'm off."

  Susanne wondered if the assistant with the high waist and the clipboard had eased the studio door open to let him out, but she was inching it shut again, having admitted herself. "Increasing violence," the presenter said. "Any more ideas on why there's so much?" />
  Susanne had some new ones, but preferred to keep them to herself now that the burning glass of the argument had moved away from her. She gave Marshall a quick grin which wasn't too far removed from how she felt, then realised that the studio assistant was gazing at her and displaying a scrap of paper.

  When Susanne made to rise, the assistant gestured her back and held up the paper as a promise of delivery. She was waiting until the attention of the cameras was well away from Susanne, who heard the argument dodge about the audience, retreating from her and then, like a storm, coming back. She found it difficult to be aware of anything except repetitions of the word violence, violence, violence. "They're scared of nothing any more," a man shouted from one end of the back row, "we've got to bring back fear." A pole lifted toward him, and the assistant tiptoed fast across the studio floor, glancing at the cameramen in case they should wave her away.

  She placed the folded paper firmly in Susanne's hand and retreated. Had she been ensuring that the paper didn't fall? The pressure of her hand on Susanne's had felt like reassurance. Marshall leaned over to read the message as Susanne unfolded it, and she thought of keeping it from him until she had seen what had been addressed to her, but it was too brief for him not to be able to read it immediately. All it said was YOUR HUSBAND WITH POLICE.

  2 Meaning Business

  Just as Don grew convinced that the suburb was so content with its own uniformity that it would repeat itself for as many miles again, he saw a park beyond the low boxy houses which perhaps only the rain, as prevalent in Manchester as he'd heard it was in Seattle, had rendered the color of mud. One of the three-story streets across the park might even be his goal. He pulled over behind a van with a For Sale notice in the rear window, and a lengthily raincoated youth standing restlessly on the street corner stared at him as though he had no right to be there or had better prove he had. "A to Zee," Don mouthed partly for his benefit, and opened the book of street maps on the seat beside him.

  It was the only book whose spine he'd ever broken since he could remember, and that was partly from frustration. Not only had some streets been blocked up or restricted to one way or demolished since the compilation of the book, but the reality through which he was driving was out of proportion with the maps, streets ending before they were supposed to or narrowing unexpectedly or curving where they had been shown as straight, so that he kept thinking he had even less sense of where he was. Whenever the streets on the maps grew profuse he was reminded that he needed reading glasses, and now he picked up the magnifying glass from the dashboard.

  The glass had come from a drawer in the slipcase of his copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he caught sight of himself in the rear-view mirror he saw how much it made him resemble some eccentric sleuth in an English detective story, with reddish hair that contradicted any amount of brushing, high forehead whose wrinkles implied it was packed with more thoughts than he presently had, eyebrows trying to meet across the bridge of his long nose, heavy eyelids which lent him a semblance of sleepy watchfulness behind his spectacles, mouth skewed slightly leftward so that even when he wasn't smiling he appeared to be about to do so. His glance had also shown him the youth looking yet more suspicious and perhaps suspected, digging his fists so deep in the pockets of the pallid plastic raincoat that it gaped to reveal he was wearing only a T-shirt and torn jeans. "Do what you want to yourself so long as you keep it to yourself," Don murmured, lowering the glass to lasso the map into focus. There, when he tilted his head until his chin and shoulder squeezed out a pinch of flesh, was the street name he'd been told, and next to it a patch of not much of a shape, identified as a park in larger letters than the streets had room for. He let the glass fall on the open pages and sent the Volvo toward the park.

  "Left into traffic," he reminded himself at the end of the street, "learn left, lurch left." An empty swing flew up from a playground in the park to greet him. A boy of about Marshall's age was swinging it to wind the chains tight around the bar, while others smashed the ends of a seesaw against the concrete. Two boys no older than seven, who had apparently been driven out of the playground, were hanging onto the railings and watching the traffic, and Don grimaced sympathetically at them as he passed. The next moment each of them flung an object at the car.

  Don almost let go of the wheel in order to protect his face before he realised the missiles had cracked, not the windshield. They were large garden snails, and the impact hadn't killed them. "Hey, come on, guys," Don protested at the boys, who responded with a jeer apiece as they picked up ammunition to await the next car. He might have driven around the park to confront them if he weren't already late for his appointment. He switched on the wipers, then the washers, and gazed ahead, trying to ignore the greenish writhing as he steered into the side road.

  This one seemed to have taken the British habit of concealing street names on the walls of houses or front gardens even further. Eventually he located the name, low on an already low garden wall, and figured that Damb Street would have been Dane Street, his destination, until someone had attacked it with a marker pen. He backed the station wagon against the curb in front of a dusty car of indeterminate breed which was either parked or abandoned, and locked all his doors with a single twist of the key before proceeding to the uneven sidewalk.

  Unbroken ranks of houses reared up against the white June sky from narrow gardens stuffed with grass gleaming like knives with rain. That had stopped, leaving wet islands to steam as they dwindled on the sidewalk. Don couldn't see into a single room, though more than one curtain blinked. Nor was it easy to find house numbers; those that hadn't been stolen had been spray-painted illegible. He walked several hundred yards before catching sight of a rusty oval plate numbered 66, dangling from its one surviving screw in a position which seemed to turn the digits into frozen sperm. He crossed the cracked backbone of the roadway, and had just determined which of the colourless front doors must be number 73 when a net curtain stirred below it. That would be the basement to which the call from the public call-box had invited him, if invited was the word.

  While most of the basements peered through grass, the strip in front of this one was planted with broken bottles. Beside and below the stone steps leading up to the front entrance was an even less painted door, approached by steps scattered with chunks of moss. Don grasped the pockmarked bar of the door knocker and succeeded in raising it about an inch so as to deal its brass plate a timid rap. The brass flap of the letter-box looked capable of issuing more of a summons, and Don was pushing it open, his fingernails catching in its blackened pores, when it said, "I'd not do that."

  "Mr. Mevin?"

  "Depends. Are you the book feller?"

  Don wondered in passing whether the man beyond the door was mispronouncing an old-fashioned S as a bibliographical joke. "Sure am."

  "You'll have a name then, will you?"

  "Don Travis."

  "That's the lad."

  A series of noises of bolts and chains descended the edge of the door, which then protested a good deal about opening to disclose a short hall papered with dimness. The tenant, who was so short Don could look down on the three lines of grey hair which linked his ears across his mottled head, swayed backward from foot to foot, retying the cord of his ankle-length tiger-coloured dressing-gown. "Step over," he advised.

  In place of a welcome mat, Don saw just in time, a line of barbed wire was nailed to the carpet. Barbed wire framed three sides of the front door too, and the inside of the letter-slot, and Don was wary of touching the door to shut it until Mevin laughed at him. "You're fine once you're in. There's been a few unwelcome sorts have gone hopping away, right enough. Yank, eh?" he said in a tone which suggested he was telling Don what to do, and vanished crabwise into the front room.

  Don heeled the door shut and followed. The small room was occupied almost entirely by books, though there was a black and white television with a screen no larger than the spread of Don's hand beneath the window. An announce
r was saying, "If you're travelling toward London on the M1—"

  "I'm not, you silly prat," Mevin said, and switched him off. "Thought you sounded Yankee on the phone. Something wet?"

  "It's a bit early for me."

  "Just tea, pal. Always kept me company when I was a watchman. That's where I learned the ropes," Mevin said, indicating barbed wire which surrounded the net-curtained window, and added with a faintly injured air, "It's made."

  "In that case, thanks."

  "Be having a look at my library. There's a good few Yankee items I brought back when I was on the freighters. You won't have seen some of them too often, I'll wager," Mevin said, and swayed away along the hall.

  Don pressed the squeaky brass light-switch down to augment the sunlight which hung from the window, and saw yet more books. Books were piled on the mantelpiece above a fireplace strewn with sooty newspaper tied in knots; they couldn't have been stacked any higher on two of the three infirm chairs without toppling over the chair backs, they surrounded the carpet as though they'd sprouted from the skirting-board below the musty wallpaper. Don sank to his knees to examine the books on the floor, many of which retained their dust wrappers, and the damp he'd been smelling reached up through the carpet for him.

  By the time Mevin returned with a plump mug and its leaner relative, Don was squatting in front of a chair piled with books. "You won't find some of those on a church stall," Mevin said.

  Don stood up to accept the heavier mug. "I've been surprised by what I've found."

  "Not the likes of Henry Miller, though. Bet he's worth a bomb, specially in that kind of nick. Don't worry, they're legal here now. The police won't give you any bother."

  Don fed himself a token sip of lukewarm mud. "Unfortunately that's the drawback, that they've been published here."

  "Aye, only these were first," Mevin said, screwing up his face as though to wring thoughts out of it. "That's what they pay for in your trade."

  "First printings are, but these aren't, you see."