by Will Self
Up above three thousand British guns fired four million shells. Below in their burrows the trogs smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and studied Sidgwick on ethics. They read the poetry of Robert Browning, learnt Arabic script from Ali the Zouave, or refined their understanding of surplus value and the public utility of social-credit unions. All those phases of development Stanley had found it so hard to concentrate on, he now he understood and could expound upon. Feydeau’s Discussion Club and its association with the Socialist League had all been minuted by him – so it was that in his underground reclusion he recalled the words of Morris and Kropotkin, the papers given by Missus Marx Aveling and Miss Schreiner. Those who descended had scant interest in the International Alliance of Women or the International League for Peace and Freedom – but Stan did. He sent his own emissaries aloft, and they came back with copies of the Ardent and The Freewoman, and with books by Miss Dix and Missus Perkins Gilman. Stanley explained to his comrades that: The future belongs to the feminised man, he who is capable of wearing cambric with pleasure – as we do – and of loving – as we do – and of regarding the fairer sex to be our own, and women to be to be not helpmeets but authorities on the blood-law of biology. So as to align still more completely with the emergent world-consciousness, Stanley obtained Southall’s Sanitary Towels and wore them one week a month – then he would not lie with Huggins. He sewed a fillet in his blouse and filled it with increasing amounts of sand, a half-pound per month, while encouraging the others to join in his couvade. And the troglodytes listened – and they approved, and many followed his lead, with the exception of Mohan, who, having been with Stanley since he first came down, felt free to chide him: Blighty, you should know this, Henry Morton, this is a Hindi word, bilyati – meaning foreign, you see. Now, taken up by the Britishers to mean their home, it will point back at them – a bilyati gun. And every time you say it, sing it, scream it, you fire the bilyati gun in your own face! . . . Take me back to dear old bilyati! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! It was not until many months later – after the collapse of the Italian Front, the Bolsheviks’ rising and the taking of the Holy City, that a fellow called Cummins, who’d been a shop steward in Greenock, came down to them. He talked heatedly of Henderson’s constitution, and Stan said, Well and good – your catechism. Yet it’s so here already: what little there is belongs to us all in kind, there’s no sugar – so we’re never bitter. No man would think to lug one of the great shields into his own little pit! As for administration, what of it? A tunnel needs pumping and it’s all hands to the levers, a new one wants electrification and the men with know-how are parcelled up the line without any ado – these things simply happen. But, Cummins said, this is anarchism, man – there’s no system, no method, no means of carryin’ it forward as a programme for the nation –. To drown him out they all sang: I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! And to inflame the doughty Scot still more, Stan planted a smacker on his dirty forehead . . . Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! When Ludo broke through at Arras, Cummins – who had a stubborn sense of his own socialistic amour proper – said that this’d teach the trogs – who were in considerable disarray. Stanley and Huggins laughed at him. We’ll sail a lighter up the Scheldt! they cried. Don’t you see, it matters not a fig to us who’s victorious – there’re strikes aplenty in Germany, they’ve no more belly for it than the rest, it ain’t the Russkies who’ve capitulated at Brest–Litovsk, it’s Ludo, Fuckenhayn and Kaiser-bloody-Bill! — And Schmidt, from Köln, who had a lusty tenor, a nose that could smell a bottle of Moselle through sixty feet of cold dead mud, and a genius for organising chorales, led them into the verse, One day Mickey O’Shea stood in a trench somewhere, So brave, having a shave, and trying to part his hair. Mick yells, dodging the shells and lumps of dynamite: Talk of the Crystal Palace on a Firework night –! To vex the Scot further, Stan took the just-boiled dixie, and, making him a cup of George, handed it over, saying, The fucking Irish, they’ve got the right idea: no work – that’s the soup ticket! And Cummins smiled in a doubly-deboshed way. — It had grown quiet on this section of the line, and they’d been there so long the trogs had set the place up all snug: brought down glassware, a horsehair settee, two big old paintings of civic dignitaries from the remains of a Stadhuis, and a model of the pre-war coal mines that recalled to the troglodytes’ minds their own extensive tunnel system made awfully small. There was also a sheep dog who did gamely enough in his treadmill on a diet of Victoria’s Houndmeal that Stan ordered from Spillers of Cardiff and had delivered poste-restante to Boulogne. Brass quoits, a fifteen-inch-long crystal dolphin, a glass case full of stuffed hummingbirds arranged in a fleur-de-lis, a Chinese vase that held a variety of different parasols and ladies walking umbrellas – dressing cases, valises, portmanteaus, collar and bonnet boxes. Goin’ on a journey, are ye, Cummins grumbled, and Stan said, I rather think we will be soon enough. — The summer waned up above, and the febrile Tommies chased the feverish Jerries east – the subterraneans, unaffected by the pandemic, came boiling up
out of das Grab – so many of them! Lice! Silverfish! They had not known of their own numbers, had not appreciated the greatness of the deliverance afforded beneath no-man’s-land. Up they came from the pits, soak holes, and deep-bore tunnels shaped by their fugitive bodies – the resurrected, the reborn . . . And then the polyglot pack divided, weeping farewell on one another’s shoulders, lovers parted, brothers separated – and away they went: the Germans tiptoeing behind the vanquished Kaiserliches Heer, the British, French and Belgians behind the demobilising allies. It was a game of grandmamma’s footsteps played along a three-hundred-mile front: when the topsiders turned round, haunted by this prickling sensation that a multitude of someones thronged at their backs, the underground men stood stock still, counting off the minutes before they could safely move again, while silently singing, Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! They commandeered a fishing boat they’d found hauled up for caulking on a shingle bank a few miles down the coast from Nieuport. In that great space of wind, salt spray and the grey-green wave backs, the men were stunned – they stripped off and rolled over and over again across the hot pebbles. Stanley, Huggins, Cummins and Mohan were in the vanguard of the returnees, together with thirteen coolies they brought with them from the bowels of the earth. Already, at the railheads and in the seething tent encampments that flapped across the land, the trogs had sewn their revolutionary seed. It needed no broadcasting: they were the war’s bumper crop, implanted for long years in the ploughed earth of Flanders, Artois, Picardy and Champagne, they had sprung up, white-green from their long inhumation, the inspiring refutation of all the stifling aims promulgated by the cracked brass. So many of them, the arisen, adding soda to the spirits of their war-weary comrades, so that, once merged, the entire moving mass became giddy with a sense of its own transformative power. — They landed in Broadstairs bay and went straight up the hill to the station. The narrow streets of the town were full of newspaper boys crying the latest headlines: THOUSANDS GIVEN UP FORFOR DEAD FOUND TO BE LIVING IN EXTENSIVE TUNNELLING BENEATH NO-MAN’S-LAND, but far more germaine were: MARY ALLEN ASSUMES COMMAND OF RESURGENT WSPU and: LAID-OFF MUNITIONETTES ANGRY DEMONSTRATIONS. Stanley prevailed upon the ticket-office clerk to give them all passes by appealing to his egalitarian nature – and this the clerk did, while looking askance at those he believed to be white slavers, and those he considered to be sickeningly effeminate, what with their blouses, their long hair and their Augustus John hats. Stanley addressed the clerk and his own comrades thus: There’re a million women in this land of ours who’ve been subjected to both the disciplines and the privations of industrial work, work for which they have nothing to show but the loss of their health and the deaths of th
eir loved ones. These, then, are our natural allies, lads – we’ve no need of the broken Tommies, nor of Cummins’s lot – excusing your presence, Horace . . . — In Woolwich, Sidcup, Eltham and Plumstead they went from hostel to hostel, and at all locations they found the green-and-red-striped banners already flying: red for the revolution and green for that scientific cultivation of the land they believed would allow for a New Britain, its well-fed and healthy folk freed from material want not by the machines – which had been engines only for the maceration of bodies and the grinding up of souls – but by the Ardent Spirit of natural increase, chemically assisted. The old order has been buried, Stanley told these rough girls from Silvertown and Mile End, beneath the soil of France and Belgium! And he promised them that from now on their lives would be like hopping or a fruit-picking holiday – albeit without the necessity to fill such and such a number of bushels. The rough girls teased him, saying, My, my, ain’t ’e grown – a bang-up-to-date Burlington Bertie – so that he rejoined: Us all, dallying in the fields, kipping in the haystacks, wandering orchards that belong to us, our aprons filled with ripe pears . . . The trams were so overwhelmed by the revolutionists that they crept along at walking pace, palpitating with the close-packed bodies of young women and men – liberties were undoubtedly taken, yet they were given as well: a paroxysm of free love that sent clergymen scuttling from the streets, convinced the last trumpet had been sounded, when it was only the joyous tootling of ten thousand bugles. And everywhere that Stanley went, while he spoke with all, he sought only one: I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, WHOA! — From the Queen Mary Hostel in Plumstead he was directed – by a vicious old sot – to the Ministry’s Resettlement House in Pimlico. When he arrived the place was empty but for two dashing young ladies covered in paint and smoking cigarettes in extravagantly long onyx holders. They stood at the open drawers of the steel cabinets and flipped through hundreds of filing cards before finding the correct address. — The centre of the city was in a state of foment, news flew out from the telegraph offices and telephone exchanges of more and more echelons going over to the Red-and-Greens: all forty thousand women of the VAD, a further eighteen from the Land Army, a topping twenty-odd from Queen Mary’s Corps – detachments of Territorials that had arrived double-quick in order to guard Whitehall and Parliament against the insurrectionaries formed up, but then refused to fire upon them, casting aside their weapons and uniting in the giddying dawn of the New Age. With all the excitement – the singing, the chanting, and the motor cars racing through the streets with their horns blaring – he yet saw no real violence. On the embankment by Millbank a few flappers twitted an old gentleman – pulling his swallow-tails, snatching his cigar, the flash of the monocle across his breast as he swings round and around until it flies off into the river . . . No transport to be had, so Stan walks over Vauxhall Bridge and then up the South Lambeth Road: the north side may’ve been in an uproar, but here a nurse strolls behind a perambulator, each tightly laced boot exactly framed by a paving stone – a grocer’s boy wheels a bicycle top-heavy with rhubarb beneath the blue-and-cream-striped awnings of a row of shops, and the horse droppings scattered on the warm setts give off ineffably sweet smells of hay and happily digested oats, the flies curling up from them a healthy part of the whole that settles once more as soon as Stan has passed by. The London suburbs are, he thinks, far too widespread and full of their own bricky solidity to be blown up by any mere human impact: towards Croydon and Sydenham Hill the revolutionary wave will be dying away in plashes of over-familiarity and small perturbations of unconventionality, such as the wearing of a cap at a rakish angle . . . In the front yard of the long, four-storey apartment building there are piles of sand and broken tiles left behind by the contractors, above these range windows sunk in mock-Tudor half-timbering, while in the very centre of the building a Neoclassical pediment has been placed with a roundel instead of a lunette – the roundel has these figures set into it: 1916. Apple tree, pear tree, plum tree pie, How many children before I die? One, two, three — at least five of them, barefoot, in dirty knickerbockers and, despite the September sunshine, all with thick mufflers around their stalk-necks – he supposes to ward off the influenza that must still be hovering here, among the gold medallions scattered between the chestnut boughs. And so they chant: She open ve winder an’ in-flew-enza! She open ve winder an’ in-flew-enza! which draws him towards a raised casement in the sub-basement. That’s it. He understands now: no matter what enlightenment comes with the New Dawn, even when the fever hospitals, gaols and asylums are turned over to the revolutionists to become beacons of free-association and communal living, still no acts of women or men can ever raise the soil from my back, Our cemetery’s so small there’ll be no room fer ’em all, Our cemetery’s so small there’ll be no room fer ’em all . . . The insupportable weight and density of the mud, packed by the pounding of the shells into every nook and cranny of his form – the steel, and the steel that’s made that steel – of all this there will be more: more milled and turned and drilled, the component parts stretching out into the future on a ceaselessly revolving conveyor belt that has no end. He need never have resurfaced at all – his hands shake and twitch, his back bends . . . bends . . . he is seized by impulsiveness in fingers, hands, feet, toes, and in his inclinations also, an irresistible urge to point, poke, touch, lick, want – this, that, all others . . . and yet he cannot, of his own volition, move at all, Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! – the bilyati gun goes off in my face . . . The milieu intérieur, a sepulchral Scots voice intones, as described by Claude Bernard – it is, I would say, best understood as a landscape of its own – a habitable terrain, why not? Possessing hills, rivers, lochs – fields and meadows too . . . However, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that the significant features are, aye, well, broad fairways, sand traps and beautiful – mark me, bea-u-tiful – greens. A second voice – weedy, querulous – intervenes: You make it sound like a golf course. SEPULCHRAL: Well, indeed – that is its problem in a nutshell. I mean, in so far as the milieu intérieur is a place that can be mapped out within the catatonic’s mind, it’s also most assuredly incapable of sustaining life. It cannot feed its creator – while those others who play round it are ghosts . . . shades –. WEEDY: Ghostly fours –. SEPULCHRAL: Fours, pairs – she, the catatonic you see before you, she waves them through – that’s precisely what she’s doing right now, waving them through. She cannot play with them because they don’t, rightly speaking, exist, and so she gives them precedence –. WEEDY: And what about the treatment, how does that alter things? SEPULCHRAL: What we do here? Why, blow it all to smithereens of course – I mean, ideally it would, but perhaps only plough it over for a season or so. The important thing is the dramatics of the procedure – we cannot, at present, know the precise effects on the brain, but the induced coma state, the intensity of the shock itself, and then: hey presto! the reawakening with a jab of glucose. I suppose a fancy way of putting it would be to say that she’ll reach a new psycho-physical accommodation, but I’m a plain-speaking Renfrewshire man, no truck with scientific jargon of any sort – nor am I in thrall to the kirk, still, I’ve seen absolutely astonishing resurrections . . . Nurse Greengage, would you be so good as to shut the door and bolt it? GREENGAGE: Certainly, Doctor Cummins. WEEDY: What’re they for? CUMMINS: The restraints? Surely they took you through the whole drill at Claybury, young man, absolutely standard procedure. WEEDY: Oh, I don’t know – can you be certain that –? I mean, I’ve read through her notes quite thoroughly, it doesn’t appear on the face of it that this is schizophrenic catatonia per se – . CUMMINS(laughing, a dreadful grating sound): Per se! Oh, do give it a rest, Marcus – it doesn’t matter a fig what’s caused the catatonia, could be syphilis or bloody socialism for that matter . . . (he hums) . . . The more we are to-gether the merrier we shall be –! Oh, come on, man, I’m only joshing you, you take everything too damn seriously – it’s
not as if I’m advocating the good old English fist, do I look like a New Party man? Y’know, what we damn well do need is some sort of an atom-smasher like they have in Cambridge, smash all the madness to pieces, eh? As things stand we throw the switch on this apparatus here and we short-circuit half the hospital – you must’ve noticed? MARCUS: Yes . . . I have, and it’s an eerie sight – if the fuses don’t blow, the bulbs all along the lower corridor go dim, one after another, travelling down that enormous length . . . like a sort of pulse, I s’pose you’d say. CUMMINS: Spare us the piety – pass me that kidney dish, Nurse . . . Thankee . . . a-ha. Have you see the plans for the new Underground station, Marcus? MARCUS: No, I haven’t as yet. CUMMINS: Queerest thing – shaped like a sort of hatbox, can’t say I care for it, I’m old enough to remember when, in the waiting rooms of London suburban stations, you’d get a couple of oils of some civic dignitaries or other hung up on the wall and a stuffed bird or two in a glass case! He lies, the torturer, he is Albert’s creature . . . — They had been happy and sustained a functioning community. There had been – so far as she was aware – additional production, although this was by no means demanded of them after the suffering they had endured performing the Imperialists’ war work, and the stresses of the revolution. Some brushes, clothes pegs and baskets – simple artefacts they were happy to turn out. Stanley had said: You and your comrades take the old booby-hatch up in Friern Barnet – we’ve no use for it now the greater part of the inmates have been discharged to the care of their families or their local cooperatives. And there’ll be a form of justice, I believe, in free women and men of a rational cast ruling the roost where but lately the poor and deluded were confined against their will. (CUMMINS: Some of this electrolytic cream spread on the temples will ensure closer contact and improve connectivity . . .) They had retained their overalls from the munitions factories as a badge of pride – besides, what could be more supremely rational dress than these rough ticken clothes? Tunics, divided skirts and heavy jackets that protected them from the cold and damp of the old buildings, warding off an ague that seemed present in their very bricks and mortar. This was during the early days – later on, when things had been more organised, clothes were donated by the London fieldworkers, nothing too fancy but perfectly serviceable and freely given. A thousand female comrades took up their quarters on the western side of the former asylum, and a thousand male ones to the east. Mingling among both sexes and assigned to their living units were a proportion of malefactors and counter-revolutionists distinguishable by their dark and drab uniforms. These women and men were charged with the mundane and trivial tasks: the locking and unlocking of doors, the changing of soiled sheets and garments, the administration of medicines, and the assistance of those who requested peace and quiet to special reclusion units. The notion was that they were to be re-educated by their close association with these women of high ideals, whose long and arduous labours had dinned into them a mortal legacy of diseases: tuberculosis, typhoid, dysentery and venereal infections transmitted via sexual congress with males of the exploitative class. (CUMMINS: If you’d all please ensure that you’re standing with both feet on the rubber matting . . .) Theirs was not the only phalanstery to be established by the Central Cooperative under the chairmanship of Stanley Death. The communalists chose not to discuss such mundane matters, but over the years I learned – by earwigging on the resentful detainees – that there were others at Hanwell, Napsbury, Claybury, Sheffield, Banstead and Tooting Bec – a ring of them surrounding the site of the former metropolis, wherein the same experiments in communal living, and the same practices of the freest thought, were pursued. The wildest and the freest of thoughts – and speech! A’stutterin’ anna mutterin’ . . . she’s seen a fellow in a picture on the wall, and he’s stepped out of it and had her away, into the family way, she’s given birth! To an automaton! A little Enigmarelle of her own! (CUMMINS: Interestingly, there is some evidence that menstruation may adversely effect the therapy – not an issue in this patient’s case, nor those of most of the other female inmates, whose menses are . . . How’d’you put it, Nurse? GREENGAGE: Well, I don’t know, Doctor –. CUMMINS: Disrupted? Suppressed? GREENGAGE: Well, they doesn’t ’ave their monthlies, if that’s what you mean . . . CUMMINS: Oh, indeed, si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise . . .) Spirit-rapping, table-turning – it was scarcely to be marvelled at that they would entertain such things – the communal areas crackled with talk of travelling to other worlds, humans vivisected into being from the bound forms of animals. Some were certain that death-rays were being beamed at them from the People’s Palace across the vale, and that these emissions caused them to hear the voices of their loved ones who had passed over – they spent hours, days, setting down these communiqués in the penny jotters obtainable from the commissary. Yet this was understandable, surely? Forgivable in the light of the percipient discussions that were also held regarding universal provision of family planning, infant welfare, education and social security – discussions I myself minuted, then presented in report form to the commissioners of Stanley’s Board of Control, who inspected the phalanstery on an annual basis. (MARCUS: She seems completely inert now – marked hypotonia. CUMMINS: That’s entirely as it should be, the curare means even if you boink ’em they don’t react – see?) Not that they paid these much attention – but, then, that too was understandable . . . forgivable – didn’t they have their own work cut out for them: demolishing the centuries-old unsanitary housing and stony bombast that the foolish capitalists and warmongers had formerly believed the greatest city on earth? Then raising in its stead a few slim and tapering steel-and-glass towers, while establishing on its shattered remains the raised field systems determined by the new agriculture – fields for wheat, of course, but also orchards and water meadows, vineyards too – for why shouldn’t the ordinary folk also have Hock and seltzer? (CUMMINS: And . . . on!) — It was Gracie who first noticed the changes under way: the infiltration of BoC spies among those sent for re-education, the alteration of the regime from voluntary retreat, to one of . . . confinement. The introduction of electrification to the phalanstery, and other forms of mechanisation that were precisely the regimentations and oppressions of the human spirit and the human body that the revolution had been against! Next came the punishments – which were presented, derangingly, as . . . treatments, but which left these once-proud women and men . . . gibbering, wholly broken down . . . in pieces. I told her: This is Albert’s doing. He has won out finally. Death-rays of Stanley, death-rays of Albert playing, each on the other brother’s blank face . . . and Albert the winner, as always, reimposing his own cruel regime on the but recently liberated land. Soon enough they came: the redbrick serpents snaking over Muswell Hill and coiling across the valley towards the phalanstery, civilissssation they hissed. Dear Gracie – she had never fully adjusted to life at Colney Hatch. She said . . . she said to me, that to look along the lower corridor, to allow your eyeball to shoot along its third-of-a-mile barrel was . . . to give in to . . . a sort of . . . madness: the blinding white flash skronks into the negative images of feathery weeds agitating along the trackside. The train sways away and he stands on the platform looking up at the steep sides of the cutting and thinking: For this, I am . . . not ready. And so, after stomping laboriously up the steel staircase he turns east along Friern Barnet Lane, intending . . . what? He checks his watch (a sixteen-year-old petrol station giveaway, the face of which I have looked upon thousands of times yet never seen): One thirty – the pubs will be serving grapeshot peas, gassy lager, offensive chip weaponry, battering cod . . . I’m hungry . . . but not for THAT! He plods on, intending, he thinks, simply to take a look at Arnos Grove tube station, the Modernist hatbox design of which he has strangely fond memories . . . Take a look – or perhaps enter, exercise my Freedom and board a train that will take me home. Home. It has come to him unbidden: the notion that the flat on Fortess Road, with its tatty furnishings and ambient sound of insurance broke
rs . . . Female, fifty-three, ten years no-claims – one for John at Aviva? was his home, more than the Redington Road house had ever been – or any of his other habitations, which, now he came to think of it, were really dens . . . and I, a fox . . . an interloper into the husbandry of fence, flowerbed and shed who scratched out his own smelly shelter for a year or ten, raised a few cubs who needed National Health glasses, then skulked away again –. What’s your dick like, homey, what’re you into –? is slung from the open window of car that spurts past, together with the cat’s-piss-smell of contemporary marijuana – a hot hatch, isn’t that what they’re called? Why fight it? Busner thinks, Why delay or drag my feet when the past is inexorably creeping up behind? Which is – he goes on at himself – the essence, surely, of all talking therapies, and something that Ronnie nailed perfectly adequately in that silly chapbook of his – what did he call them? The whirligogs and fankles that beset our emotions. — On he goes, reflecting ruefully on the vogue for such things in the seventies, including his own inquire-within tool: The Riddle! He barks with laughter, then chuckles more sincerely in acknowledgement of his own follies . . . after all, perhaps at last I’m solving it? The road grumbles between nondescript residential blocks and postwar houses, then beetles over the brow of the hill and smooths down to a fistulous roundabout from which spin off shopping parades. It’s the same sequencing of consumer DNA that he had left behind not twenty minutes since: Y Beauty & Hair (Why indeed?), Monarch Dental Services (The teeth of kings?), a fried-chicken joint, a newsagent plastered with phonecard decals, a betting shop . . . and again, once more – with feeling . . . His feet are aching and sodden in their age-inappropriate footwear, although, he considers: In an earlier era I’d’ve been crippled by now with lumbago or gout – maladies that have an honestly Anglo-Saxon ring, Falstaffian almost . . . He pulls himself together with the steel bar surrounding a waist-high freestanding hoarding, upon the metal sheet of which a young woman enjoys herself with a Magnum ice cream. In through the half-open door of the bookie he sees the bruising after-images of horse races: roan threads spooling through Haydock Park, digital threads cantering beneath them, the glabellar tap that causes blinking cursors . . . The binary storm rages around him, a blizzard of ones and noughts – why fight it? I am, Busner thinks, no Falstaff, only a maddened Lear out on the toughened-glass heath, where nothing comes of nothing. And yet . . . and yet . . . there is something: the cursor blinking on and off, one or nought, should or ought? It strikes him that: It must’ve been at exactly that time – to the very year – that they were developing the first microprocessors, writing new programming languages and creating operating systems that pushed them together soft into hard . . . Not that we – I – was aware of it, computers were Toltec pyramids, stepped down into the basements of corporate HQs, and ministered to by priestly Morlocks in white coats. I do remember an early computer game – Ping? Pong? – at any rate, two white bars either side of a blackened television screen, batting between them a white cursor which on impact made a synthesised tongue-popping noise. It was absurdly unimpressive – as a visualisation of table tennis cruder than a child’s stick drawing of a real live man, but Mark loved it . . . so for hour after hour we’d played it in amusement arcades: pulling the levers, twisting the dials, our heads hanging there in all the ring-a-ding-dinging and the reek of melting sugar . . . He sighs, Aaaaah, – Mark had given him a novelty ballpoint pen, inside its fat belly were six ink cartridges: green, blue, black, red . . . I forget the other two . . . He had explained his note-taking system to the boy and this was his thoughtful response. Mark showed his father how you could push down two of the coloured ballpoints at once, and so write duochrome. Busner had long since ceased to take any sort of notes at all – let alone such pretentious ones! Yet he feels the want of that pen now, imagines wielding it with all six nibs out, so as to fuse colour and symbology in this realisation being compounded within him from images, memories, recent ideas and long-since-made clinical observations . . . A mother and small child exit the newsagents – they wear matching scarlet puffa jackets so bright they could be spotted floundering on a glacier from a helicopter . . . The child tears the cellophane from a lollipop, the mother the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, the breeze choreographs their filmy discards . . . Aaaah, he turns abruptly away to see that the memories have indeed crept right up behind him, and that they aren’t so much as bothering to play the game! for when he turns towards them they wiggle their limbs shamelessly in the bright spring sunlight: Miriam: who gave me that digital watch, and that bastard Whitcomb – he had one of the first pocket calculators and was mucking about with it the day I went to see him and he told me they were thinking of pulling the plug from a socket hidden behind a grotesque coat tree, its nine upturned branches ending in animal horns of some sort that have been mounted into the wood. The parlour maid gets to her feet all tangled up in her full skirts and the cabling of the machine, which is, Audrey thinks, as ugly as the coat tree, being confected out of broom, bagpipes and an electrical fan. Its whine whirrs away into silence, and the housekeeper who has opened the door – a grim-faced harridan with her face scraped back into her hair and her hair scraped back into a frightening bun – calls back: That’ll do for now, Rose, before giving her attention once more to this unanticipated visitor. Is it Mister or Missus De’Ath that you wishes to see? No title is bestowed on Audrey maybe if I had a visiting card? who replies, I don’t suppose my brother will be at home, so if you could kindly tell my sister-in-law that Audrey De’Ath desires a word I’d be most obliged. She believes this well done, and that she is also well got up to pay this call in a new pleated skirt, linen for best, belted mackintosh and cloche hat. She has also borrowed a slim parasol with a porcelain handle from Appleby’s collection that must cost a month of this one’s wages – poor old mare, back in harness again! The housekeeper runs a sceptical eye from the top to the bottom of Audrey, while behind her the parlour maid continues her battle with the lashing tail of the vacuuming machine. The housekeeper is on the point of shutting the door in Audrey’s face while she goes to speak to her mistress, when two doors open simultaneously on to the hallway – one at the very back, through which Albert emerges, treading gingerly, a large china tankard in his hand – and one to the left, whence comes in a crisp cloud of white organdie a lady of Audrey’s own age, who, although she has only clapped eyes on her once, briefly, and six years previously, she nevertheless immediately recognises. Albert pads towards the door, saying, What’s this, then, Missus Egremont – then sees who it is and for a moment his broad, smooth face is seized by an unaccountable expression: Albert . . . shocked? before he moves to his wife’s side and takes her arm. Rosalind, my dear, he says, this is my sister Audrey. And to Audrey there is a curt: You’d better step in here. They all three go into the drawing room, which is as uglily done out as the hall. Surveying the heavy old pieces of oak and mahogany furniture that have been pressed into service for telephone tables, wireless and phonograph cabinets, Audrey surmises that this a domesticated battle of the sexes, one, moreover, in which the amiable and doughy blonde has already capitulated. The three of them move in and out, round and between overstuffed armchairs – a formal dance of awkwardness, until Albert says, Won’t you sit down, Audrey? No fanks, Bert, Audrey replies, cockneyfying purely to see its effect on the two of them. Then she takes up a paper knife that lies on the mantelpiece and ting-tings it along a row of china dogs, china sheep, china shepherdesses in hooped skirts with china crooks, until it clanks against a brass box fashioned from the casing of a 50-pounder shell. On the domed lid of this is inscribed: In Grateful Acknowledgement of the Service Given by Albert De’Ath –. Which is all Audrey wishes to know, so she prises open the lid with the paper knife, revealing the little white cartridges, and says, D’you mind? then without waiting for an answer withdraws a cigarette. Both De’Aths start forward, speaking over one another, The matches are –/Can I get you a –? and laughing she is pleased to take receipt of both boxes, d
eftly remove a match from each one, strike both and suck fire from one flamelet, then the other, funnelling the smoke out at them – the dead matches she drops in the grate. You’re all done at the Arsenal, then? she says presently, and Albert concedes this with a nod, before continuing, so as to forestall the looming oddity of the situation, May I introduce you to my wife, Rosalind? Audrey grimaces. – Charmed, I’m sure, and, taking the baby-soft hand she’s offered, continues: I expect you miss your gauntlets and your racy peaked cap. Rosalind blushes. – I’m – I’m . . . Well, frankly, I’m amazed you remember –. Well, I do, Audrey states baldly, and leaves go the hand, but it seems that you do too. Tell me, what did my brother say to you that day at the Danger Buildings? If he didn’t speak of me on that occasion, he must’ve since – told you something of my way of carrying on, eh? My scandalous amours and incendiary opinions? Rosalind is struck dumber – she shares with her husband an air of ponderous containment, and, while pretty enough, Audrey detects within her overripe skin fleshiness about to ooze grubbily out. We all, Albert declares, did our bit. As if this is what’s at issue between us! Audrey laughs bitterly, flings herself down in one of the chairs, boldly crosses her legs, takes a pull on her gasper and rejoins: Maybe so, Bert, although some of us sacrificed more than others, and some of us . . . She looks pointedly to the crystal dolphin that leaps beside a Chinese vase . . . gained. Turning to the silly thing in her shepherdess’s dress, she raises her voice: Did he ever speak to you of our brother, my dear? Did he so much as tell you he ’ad one? Well, ’e weren’t as clever as Bert – not a born ’ustler like your ever so upstandin’ ’usband! Stan wasn’t one to black the King’s boots, oh no, couldn’t turn three tricks at once for the same master – but ’e was our flesh an’ blood –! A cry drops down into the drawing room from high up in the house, piped here through a speaking tube Albert has had installed. Baby! Rosalind exclaims, then, spying an Old English sheepdog that lies on its back by the hearth with rigid straw-filled limbs upthrust, he chortles indulgently: Oh, the silly thing’s left his doggie here, I shall have to take Darsing up to him . . . You will excuse –. And she is gone, the stuffed dog tucked awkwardly under her fleecy arm.
