* * * *
I say hi, ho, but no one answers. The woman is by the fire with the babe. I crash down entangled and struggle up again. Why don’t the bastards come? That on my leg is the dripping of blood from my sacks. Hi! Ho! No answer. Why don’t the bastards come? I’ll smash her hands, the bitch. Up again and stumble on. Move, move, move.
* * * *
A note before we leave for the performance. The council has decided that the work is to begin next week. Keeney, the town clerk, continued to oppose but was overruled in the end. Why all this fuss about a simple, useful item? Regan says the children tell tales about how he traps rabbits from the forest—his house being on the outskirts on the other side of the town—and then eats them. One boy says he saw him burying the bones in his garden. But all this is nonsense. Goodness knows what makes children dream up these gruesome horrors to frighten each other. Keeney certainly has a gross and ruddy look. His eye is wild and distant too. He must be a throwback to more savage times. It makes you wonder how such a man could ever be elected to office by our citizens. Yet I do seem to remember a time when Keeney was quieter, paler, probably even a bit thinner. Is it my imagination?
I seem to be using these pages to gossip about fellow citizens, which would be much disapproved of if it were known. Looking through these pages, which I have kept since I gained my architectural qualifications at the town of London (and I must say I was thankful to gain them and leave that vast community, a dismal specter of history repeating itself), I notice that it is only in the past year that I have started to make comments not directly connected with my work. A sign of approaching oddity? I hope not. The city cannot afford eccentrics.
* * * *
at last they come. I can see their fire. They need my sacks, old bloody sacks. Hi, ho, hee, hee. I’ll hide the other sack. Let them roast hedgehogs while we feast in secret. Hallo, hallo, I’m here. Come on, you bastards, hurry.
* * * *
The glide and hum of our cars through the streets did not sound over the birdsong, and as we went past the quiet, white houses with their colorful gardens, the birds were just settling for the night. The concert hall was full. Regan’s playing was charming—some short pieces by Bach and Chopin and two of the delightfully intricate songs for the piano by our neighboring citizen, Jones of Piwelli. Nevertheless I wish Regan would take up writing music again. If only she had been more persistent, could have ironed out those roughnesses and unevennesses which she was so unprepared to work at Nevertheless, as I sat in the concert hall I myself designed, surrounded by our friends and listening to the music rippling from the fingers of my wife at the piano, I wondered if any existence could be happier. We have our small lovely towns, interconnected but distant from each other. We have our beautiful homes; our children are reared according to the most humane principles, carefully guided into adulthood by all the citizens. Machines free us from drudgery so that we can all lead self-motivated lives. Our small numbers mean that creating and maintaining the machines occupies only a few of us, those who love the work, for a proportion of their time. And, of course, our simple dietary wants are easily met by a small number of dedicated men and women among the citizens.
No work, no want, no misery—as I sat in the hall with the sweet summer scents wafting through the open windows, I rejoiced. The past seems like a long horror story of grinding toil, men and women teeming like rodents —and, of course, the final self-inflicted end as the world went up in flames, roasting the men and women in it like the corpses of animals over one of their own spits.
Thank God we are now at peace.
As I write, men arrive with rules and markers and go down over the lawn to within a hundred and fifty yards of the forest’s edge. The next few months, while the work continues, will be trying for those of us with houses on the city boundaries, but common sense must be served.
* * * *
tug a spine from my soft mouth to hell with these hedgehogs and the lazy women cooking them while the music and dancing go on. Lie on my back with the child beside me playing some trick with beetles and ants. I can see some stars above through the branches. The sky’s a fine thing if you’re not afraid of it. There are places where it’s all sky. Well, I’m not afraid of the sky. Thrum, thrum of the music. I’ll go down and dance soon, oh, that tall, deep, wide sky, how mad it is.
* * * *
It is raining this early morning. The sky is dark and cloudy as it moves over my head. The lawn down to the forest is dark and drenched. The men have not arrived to start their work. I feel annoyed that they should be discouraged by bad weather. Not that there is any need for haste, but such inefficiency and sloth gall me— we aim to lead a civilized life but must always strive to prevent cultivation and grace from deteriorating into laziness and enervation. What happens if it rains all summer? We all agreed the work should be completed by October, simply so that it should not drag on all through winter and into spring. As I say, there is no real need for haste, but if a job is being done it should be done swiftly. I shall go and speak to Keeney, who is, no doubt, partially responsible for the delay.
My irritability probably stems from the argument with my wife. At breakfast this morning she said we must make ready for the visit to Juram. I said that the weather was too bad, that the dripping of the trees over the road would penetrate the hood of the car. She demanded to know, if we could not travel in May, when could we travel? I said that the overcast sky, combined with overhanging trees, would make it too dark to drive. She responded by mentioning our car lights. Finally she called me irrational. Perhaps I am.
I do not want to take the forest road to Juram with my wife and child.
In the end she said that if I would not take her she would go alone or ask Keeney, whose business often takes him on visits to the Juram town officials, to take her with him. She began to toss her long hair about, a sign of determination. Eventually I gave in and said we would go. But I do not like it. I really do not like it at all. I like it less and less as the sky becomes more and more overcast and the rain heavier. It will be pitch-black on the Mendip Road and it is not altogether well maintained these days. Why Regan—but there, she must pursue her career. Although it is a pity she will not make herself concentrate and spend more time at home composing. Nevertheless, it would be a poor lookout for a concert pianist if she never played for anyone but audiences of her own townspeople. If you like, that is one of the few disadvantages of our social structure—we are somewhat cut off from each other. Our cars, although pleasant to drive in, travel scarcely any faster than one would on foot. Our journeys are lengthy, if pleasant and relaxing. We have no roar or stink or lung-clogging fumes, but our progress is slower than it was in the days of coaches drawn by horses. But we are not rovers who must go racing from place to place, nor speed-lunatics who will sacrifice all pleasantness for the excitement of crashing along.
Now the sky overhead looks truly black and threatening. I shall put my things together for the journey and hope that at the last moment my wife will see sense. And I shall go to see Keeney and inquire about why the work has not started.
* * * *
A most alarming experience. I am still trembling.
Keeney was not there. I walked to his house, circumventing the town center, taking the broad and pleasant roads toward the edges of the forest. Even under rain and heavy skies our streets are still beautiful and the smell of the lovely gardens under rain is delicious.
Naturally I was shocked, although I tried not to be, when I reached Keeney s house. It is set on the edge of the town with streets on one side, and, on the other, the expanses of vegetable gardens and fruit trees which extend almost to the forest. What a spectacle met my eyes! To begin with, he has dug up his garden, so that the whole area, about an acre, I suppose, looks like a plowed field. And at the same time he has uprooted every paving stone from the path leading to his door and tossed them, higgledy-piggledy, to one side. To reach his front door I was obliged to trudge along the flattened earth
where the stones had been, getting mud all over my shoes and the bottoms of my trousers. I considered it most careless and thoughtless of Keeney. Admittedly, sometimes the desire for change and alteration leads one to drastic action, but one has a duty to use a certain restraint and make sure that the changes are conducted with discretion so that they do not produce an unpleasant effect like that. It is surely unsuitable for a senior town official to reduce his home to such a filthy and depressing condition.
By the time I reached the door, I was in an understandable state of apprehension. I was not looking forward to my task of reproaching Keeney with his laxness over the question of the building work. And other things disconcerted me too, though I did not notice them consciously at the time.
When I got to the porch, the front door would not open—naturally I pushed it, and pushed again, but it would not yield. Can you imagine it? The man had, to all intents and purposes, locked his door, as if someone in the house were in the process of arriving or departing this earth. After my attempts to open the door I thought again and wondered if this were the case. But no one had visited us to tell us not to go to Keeney’s house. Mrs. Keeney had certainly not informed the council that she wished to bear a child—in any case, at her age such a request would never have been granted. Keeney’s daughter, Adela, was unmarried. The council had not been informed that any of the family were ill. The only possibility was that there had been an accident to one of them, or, unworthy thought, that Adela had defied the law again and committed the act which had nearly had such serious consequences for her before. I naturally pushed this thought from me. I reflected at that moment that the oddity which had struck me as I stood pushing the unyielding door was that the curtains in the upper rooms were drawn. But not in the lower—I had seen perfectly well into the living room as I squelched my way up to the house. As I stood on that step with the rain teeming down into Keeney’s chaotic garden, I lost my temper and decided that, unannounced Arrival or Departure or not, I would gain entry. I first found the bell and rang it, and failing to get any result, began to knock and pound on the door. After I had been knocking for some time, I heard the bolts being drawn back . . .
* * * *
clear out the bones I say to my wife and light a light. I can see nothing. She lies in a corner, not answering, so I beat her with my stick. She still says nothing. I beat her till the blood runs. She just groans and rolls over to face the wall. Of course, the child is weeping. I give him a kick, that’ll teach him sobbing, not that he needs teaching, and walk off. I find Hodge, who smashed his wife’s head. We go hunting. Hey, ho, crashing through bush and tree until toe run it to earth near the mere and bash it to death. Carry it back and they all come out and sing. All but my wife still skulking in the home with the women. Feasting tonight, all thanks to yours truly. Hurroo.
* * * *
. . . and Mrs. Keeney put her head out, looking worried. Naturally it would be out of order to discuss a fellow citizen, but I must say her pie and cake baking have fallen off significantly and there is talk of giving her a lighter job. She looks thinner too. Funnily enough, as Keeney increases in bulk, his wife seems to diminish.
I stepped inside the house, although it seemed to me that Mrs. Keeney was a second or two late in opening the door, so that I almost felt I was elbowing my way in.
“I trust I have not come at any inconvenient moment,” I said, really expecting her to tell me that I had. Her depressed air and the locked door all added up to an Arrival or a Departure taking place.
But she said no, I had not come at such a moment. I walked into the living room and asked if Keeney was at home. I observed that he had moved all the furniture since I was last there, somehow crowding it all over to one side of the room, which was large, so that there was a huge space of blank floor (for he had also rolled up the carpet) from the middle of the room to the window, which looked out over the muddy garden. Once again there was the same air of desolation, of changes about to be made, which I had sensed when outside the house.
Mrs. Keeney told me her husband was out, with such a weary air that I was surprised she offered me some refreshment. I accepted her offer, and before she left the room, asked what her husband had in mind for the house and garden. She shrugged, said she did not know, was not certain, and left the room. As I sat in that disordered room looking out at the rain over the garden, feeling profoundly uncomfortable and wishing I had never come, I heard an appalling sound—an eerie howling, followed by a heavy scratching and scrabbling at the door! I leaped to my feet and was retreating to the window, for I immediately recognized the sound for what it was, when, to my horror, the door opened. Mrs. Keeney entered with a tray, followed by—the beast!
“Come on,” I called, raising the window. “Let’s go out this way.”
And I freely confess I vaulted out, landing up to my ankles in the mud of the garden. Once outside I immediately realized that this was a most cowardly action, to leave a fellow citizen, and a woman at that, to face the danger alone. So I raised one leg and put it back over the sill, getting some purchase on the floor with my muddy foot and trying to heave myself back into the room, calling out, “Come on. Come this way, Mrs. Keeney.”
But the dog, a huge wolflike creature with feet as big as dinner plates, seemed to cause her no alarm. In fact they seemed on friendly terms. As the beast sniffed about her knees, she absentmindedly broke off a portion of the cake she had on the tray and handed it to him. He snuffled it down and seemed to want more. I regained a certain calm, although I was still very reluctant to go into the room. I recalled hearing of a naughty child who had once apparently got hold of an abandoned infant from a dog pack and had illicitly reared it until she was detected. It seems she had made quite a friend of the animal, which she had hidden in a potting shed, to the extent that the animal would not harm her. Eventually, of course, the dog grew older, began to hunt, was detected and destroyed. They say she wept and swore she could feed it on milk and honey. A likely story.
However, as I say, I remained calm to a point. Theoretically, too, I knew that at one time the dog had been a domestic animal—loathsome thought. So I remained, half in and half out of the window, observing the animal sitting by Mrs. Keeney, pounding its tail on the floor with its huge red tongue hanging out and its yellow fangs exposed. I took a deep breath and said, “Does this animal belong to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It is my husband’s.”
I said with feeling, “I am very surprised.”
Then I drew my foot and leg back over the sill into the garden, said goodbye through the open window, and went back through the mud into the road. Mrs. Keeney watched me and I should say she was on the verge of tears.
I do not know how I got home. I was shaking all the way. It was not so much the encounter with the dog. It was the dug-over garden, the pushed-about furniture and Mrs. Keeney’s peculiar, nervous manner. It was the locked door. And halfway home it struck me forcibly that the boys’ horror stories about the rabbit bones must be true. Keeney obviously was not eating the beasts himself, but he must be trapping them and feeding them to the dog. The thought of that great animal wolfing down raw flesh with its yellow fangs made me retch. And of Keeney setting the traps and extracting the results with bloody hands. Then digging pits for the bones to hide the existence of the dog. The implications of the matter were horrendous.
* * * *
I was standing in my dripping clothes drinking a glass of wine when Regan came downstairs to greet me. I told her my story straightaway. Although at first she could hardly believe it, she then accepted it with strange calmness. She said, “Take off your wet clothes first. And on no account tell Arthur.”
“As if I would,” I said.
“Go on then,” she ordered. “Well have to report it to the town council immediately.”
I nodded agreement. “Then he’ll have to go to another town,” she said matter-of-factly.
I turned in the doorway. “If they’ll have him,” I said.
>
She paused. “Yes, I suppose—”
“Do you remember Ritchie Callender?” I asked.
And neither of us spoke. Ritchie Callender had been one of our contemporaries. We had gone to school together, played together, robbed the orchards together. In his teens he had started doing a lot of gambling, neglected his work in the fields and finally got a girl pregnant and told her to say nothing to the council. When people eventually found out, the council tried to get another town to take him. But the councils of the towns he went to either rejected him outright or kept him a month or two and returned him to us. No town would accept him, he could not stay with us—so we had to exile him.
Universe 5 - [Anthology] Page 19
