The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  A young man appeared over the heads of the crowd: he had his arm around the trunk of a tree and was holding himself there. 'What are we doing this for?' he shouted. 'If they came now that would be the end of us, never mind about those kids. And if you want to know what I think, we should inform the police and be done with it. We can't cope with it. Gerald has tried — haven't you Gerald?'

  And he disappeared, sliding down the trunk.

  Emily now spoke. It looked as if someone had asked her to. She stood on the pile of bricks, serious, worried, and said: 'What can you expect? These kids defend themselves. That's what they have learned. Perhaps we should persevere with them? I'll volunteer if others will.'

  'No, no, no,' came from everywhere in the crowd. Someone shouted out: 'You've got a broken arm from them by the look of it.'

  'Rumour broke the arm, not the kids,' said Emily smiling, and a few people laughed.

  And there we stood. It is not often a crowd so large can remain silent, in indecision. To call the police would be a real descent away from what we could tolerate in ourselves, and we could not bring ourselves to do it.

  A man shouted: 'I'll call the police myself, and you can have it out with me afterwards. We've got to do it, or the whole neighbourhood will go up in flames one of these nights.'

  And now the children themselves began edging away, still in their tight little band, clutching their sticks, their stones, their catapults.

  Someone shouted: 'They're off'. They were. The crowd jostled and swayed, trying to see how the children ran across the road and disappeared into the dusk.

  'Shame,' called a woman from the crowd. 'They're scared, poor little mites.'

  At that moment there was a shout: 'The Police!' — and everyone was running. From the windows of my flat, Gerald, Emily and I and some others watched the great cars come roaring up, their lights flashing, their sirens shrieking. There was no one on the pavement. The cars drove by in a pack, around a block, and then back and around again. The shrieking, whining, clanging posse of monsters drove around and about our silent streets for half an hour or so, 'showing their teeth,' as we said, and then they went away.

  What 'they' could not tolerate, could not tolerate even now, was the semblance of a public meeting, which might threaten them. Extraordinary and pathetic, for the last thing that interested anyone by this time was changing the form of government: we wanted only to forget it.

  When the streets were quiet, Emily and Gerald went off to the other house, to see if the children had gone back there. But they had been and gone, taking with them all their little belongings — sticks and stones and weapons, bits of roast rat, uncooked potatoes.

  The two had the house to themselves. There was nothing to prevent a new community being made there. The old one might be restored? No, of course it could not: some thing organic, which had grown naturally, had been destroyed.

  ***

  It was cold. There was very little fuel. In the long dark afternoons and evenings I sat with a single candle glimmering in my room. Or I would put it out, and let the fire light the room.

  Sitting there one day, staring at the fire-flicker, I was through it and beyond — into the most incongruous scene you could imagine. How can I say 'ill-tuned' of a world where time did not exist? All the same, even there, where one took what came, did not criticise the order of things, I was thinking: What a strange scene to show itself now!

  I was with Hugo. Hugo was not just my accompaniment, an aide, as a dog is. He was a being, a person, in his own right, and necessary to the events I was seeing.

  It was a girl's room, a schoolgirl's. Rather small, with conventional flowered curtains, a white spread for the bed, a desk with school books laid tidily, a school timetable pinned on a white cupboard. In the room, in front of a mirror that ordinarily was not part of the room at all (it had a little looking glass tacked to the wall above a washbasin), a long, capacious mirror all scrolled and gilded and curlicued and fluted, the sort of mirror one associated with a film set or a smart dress shop or the theatre — in front of this mirror, here only because the atmosphere and emotional necessities of the scene needed more than the sober small square looking glass, was a young woman. Was Emily, a girl presented or parcelled up as a young woman.

  Hugo and I stood side by side, looking at her. My hand was on the beast's neck, and I could feel the tremors of his disquiet coming up into my hand from his misgiving heart. Emily was fourteen or so, but 'wellgrown' as once they had been used to put it. She was in evening dress. The dress was scarlet. It is hard to describe what my feelings were on seeing it, seeing her. They were certainly violent. I was shocked by the dress, or rather, that such dresses had ever been tolerated, ever been worn by any woman, because of what they made of the woman. But they had been taken for granted, had been seen as just another fashion, no worse or better than any.

  The dress was tight around waist and bust: the word bust is accurate, those weren't breasts, that breathed and lifted or drooped and could change with emotion, or the month's changes: they made a single, inflated, bulging mound. Shoulders and back were naked. The dress was tight to the knees over hips and bottom — again the accurate word, for Emily's buttocks were rounded out into a single protuberance. Below, it twirled and flared around her ankles. It was a dress of blatant vulgarity. It was also, in a perverted way, non-sexual, for all its advertisement of the body, and embodied the fantasies of a certain kind of man who, dressing a woman thus, made her a doll, ridiculous, both provocative and helpless; disarmed her, made her something to hate, to pity, to fear — a grotesque. In this monstrosity of a dress, which was a conventional garment worn by hundreds of thousands of women within my lifetime, coveted by women, admired by women in innumerable mirrors, used by women to clothe their masochistic fantasies — inside this scarlet horror stood Emily, turning her head this way and that before the glass. Her hair was 'up', leaving her nape bare. She had scarlet nails. In Emily's lifetime the fashion had never been thus — there had been no fashion at all, at least, for ordinary people, but here she was, a few paces from us, and, sensing us there, her faithful animal and her anxious guardian, she turned her head, slow, slow, and looked at us with long lowered lashes, her lips held apart for fantasy kisses. Into the room came the large tall woman, Emily's mother, and her appearance at once diminished Emily, made her smaller, so that she began to dwindle from the moment the mother stood there. Emily faced her and, as she shrank in size acted out her provocative sex, writhing and letting her tongue protrude from her mouth. The mother gazed, horrified full of dislike, while her daughter got smaller and smaller, was a tiny scarlet doll, with its pouting bosom, its bottom outlined from waist to knees. The little doll twisted and postured, and then vanished in a flash of red smoke, like a morality tale of the flesh and the devil.

  Hugo moved forward into the space before the mirror and sniffed and smelled at it, and then at the floor where Emily had stood. The mother's face was twisted with dislike, but now it was this beast that was affecting her so. 'Go away,' she said, in a low breathless voice — that voice squeezed out of us by an extremity of dislike or fear. 'Go away you dirty filthy animal.' And Hugo retreated to me, we backed away together before the advancing woman who had her fist raised to hit me, hit Hugo. We backed away, fast, then faster, while the woman advanced, grew large, became enormous, absorbing into herself Emily's girlhood room with its simpering conventionality, the incongruous mirror and — snap! — we were back in the living — room, in the dark place where the single candle bloomed in its hollow of light, where the small fire wanned a little space of air around it. I was sitting in my usual place. Hugo was upright near the wall, looking at me. We looked at each other. He was whimpering… no, the right word is crying. He was crying, in desolation, as a human does. He turned and crept away into my bedroom.

  And that was the last time I saw Emily there in what I have called the 'personal'. I mean that I did not again enter scenes that showed her development as a girl, or baby, or child.
That horrible mirror-scene, with its implications of perversity, was the end. Nor, entering that other world through — and this was new, too — the flames, or the husbanded glow of the fire as I sat beside it through these long autumn nights, did I find the rooms which opened and opened out from each other: or I did not think I had. Returning from a trip into that place I could not keep a clear memory of what I had experienced, where I had been. I would know that I had been there, from the emotions that sustained, or were draining, me: I had been fed there, from some capacious murmuring source all comfort and sweetness; I had been frightened and threatened. Or perhaps in, or under, the thick light of this room seemed now to shimmer another light which came from there — I had brought it with me and it stayed for a while, making me long for what it represented.

  And when it faded, how slow and dim and heavy was the air… Hugo had developed a dry cough, and as we sat together, he might suddenly jump up and go to the window, nosing at it, his sides labouring, and I would open it, realising that I, too, was in a stupor from the fug and the heaviness of the room. We would stand there side by side, breathing the air that flowed in from outside, trying to flush our lungs clean with it.

  ***

  After some days when I had not seen Emily at all, I went to Gerald's house through streets which were disordered, as always, but seemed much cleaner. It was as if an excess of dirtiness and mess had erupted everywhere, but then winds, or at least movements of air, had taken some of it away. I saw no one during this walk.

  I half expected to find that efforts had been made towards restoring the vegetable garden. No. It was wrecked and trampled, and some chickens were at work in it. A dog was creeping towards them under the bushes. This was so rare a sight that I had to stop and look. Not one dog, but a pack of dogs, and they were creeping on all sides towards the pecking chickens. I cannot tell you how uneasy this made me: there was something enormous waiting to burst in on me, some real movement and change in our situation: dogs! a pack of dogs, eleven or twelve of them, what could it possibly mean? And, watching them, my prickling skin and the cold sweat on my forehead told me I was afraid, and had good reason to be: the dogs could choose me instead of the chickens. I went as fast as I could inside the house. Which was clean and empty. Ascending through the house I was listening for life in the rooms off the landings — nothing. At the top of the house a closed door. I knocked and Emily opened it a crack — saw it was me, and let me in, shutting it fast again and bolting it. She was dressed in furs, trousers of rabbit or cat, a fur jacket, a grey fur cap pulled low over her face. She looked like a pantomime cat. But pale, and sorrowful. Where was Gerald?

  She returned to a nest she had made for herself on the floor, of fur rugs and fur cushions. The room smelled like a den from the furs, but sniffing, trying it out, I realised that otherwise the air was fresh and sharp, and that I was breathing it in great gasps. Emily made a place for me in the rugs, and I sat and covered myself. It was very cold: no heating here. We sat quietly together — breathing.

  She said: 'Now that the air outside has become impossible to breathe, I spend as much time as I can here.'

  And I understood it was true: this was a moment when someone said something which crystallised into fact intimations only partly grasped that had been pointing towards on obvious conclusion… in this case, it was that the air we breathed had indeed become hard on our lungs, had been getting fouler and thicker for a long time. We had become used to it, were adapting: I, like everyone else, had been taking short reluctant breaths, as if rationing what we took into our lungs, our systems, could also ration the poisons — what poisons? But who could know, or say! This was 'it', again, in a new form — 'it', perhaps, in its original form?

  Sitting in that room, whose floor was all covered with furs for lying and reclining, a room in which there was nothing to do but to lie, or to sit, I realised that I was — happy simply to be there, and breathe. Which I did, for a long time, while my head cleared and my spirits lightened. I looked out through clean polythene at a thick sky turbulent with clouds that held snow; I watched the light changing on the wall. From time to time Emily and I smiled at each other. It was very quiet everywhere. There came at one point a violent cackling and snarling from the garden, but we did not move. It ceased. Silence again. We sat on, without moving, just breathing.

  There were machines in the room: one hanging from the ceiling, another on the floor, one nailed to a wall. These were for purifying the air, and they worked by sending out streams of electrons, negative ions-people had used them for some time; just as no one would dream of using water from the taps unless it had passed through one of the many types of water purifier. Air and water, water and air, the basics of our substance, the elements we swim in, move in, of which we are formed and reformed, continuously, perpetually recreated and renewed… for how long had we had to distrust them, evade them, treat them as possible enemies?

  'You should take some machines home with you,' she said. 'There's a room full of them.'

  'Gerald?'

  'Yes, he went to a warehouse. There's a room of them under this one. But I'll help you carry them. How can you live in that filthy air?' and she said this in the way one does bring something out one has wanted to say, but has kept back.

  She was smiling — and reproachful.

  'Are you coming back…' — I hesitated to say 'home', but she said: 'Yes, I'll come home with you.'

  'Hugo will be pleased,' I said, not meaning any reproach, but her eyes filled and she reddened.

  'Why are you able to come now?' I asked, risking it; but she simply shook her head, meaning: I'll answer in a moment… And she did, when she had taken herself into control.

  'There's no point in my staying here now.'

  'Gerald has gone?'

  'I don't know where he is. Not since he brought the machines.'

  'He is making a new gang for himself?'

  'Trying to.'

  When she was on her feet, rolling up furs into big bundles to take with us, laying out others in which to wrap machines, there was a knock, and Emily went to see who it was. No, not Gerald, but a couple of children. At the sight of children, I was afraid. And I realised 'in a flash' — another one! that I, that everybody, had come to see all children as, simply, terrifying. Even before the arrival of the 'poor little kids' this had been true.

  These two, dirty, bright-faced, sharp, wary, sat on the fur — floor, apart from us, and apart from each other. Each held a heavy stick, with a nail-studded knob, ready for use against us, and against each other.

  'Thought I'd get a breath of fresh air,' said one, a redheaded boy, all milky skin and charming freckles. The other, a fair, angelic little girl, said, for herself: 'Yes, I wanted some fresh air.'

  They sat and breathed and watched while we, keeping an eye on them, went on with the rolling and packing.

  'Where are you going?' asked the girl.

  'Tell Gerald he knows where to find me.'

  This gave me too much food for thought for me to absorb at once.

  These children were part of Gerald's new gang? Were they not members of the gang of children from the Underground? If this was true, then… perhaps that gang was only lethal as a unit, but the individuals were savable, and Gerald had been right? When our packs were ready, we left, the children coming with us; but they left us on seeing the butcher's yard that was the garden: feathers everywhere, bits of flesh, a dead dog. The children were cutting up the dog as we left, squatting on either side of the carcass, at work with sharp bits of steel.

  We returned through streets which I pointed out to Emily as being, surely? less filthy — and noted her small checked reaction. Streets which had no one in them, not a soul apart from ourselves — I commented on this too, and heard her sigh. She was being patient with me.

  In the lobby of the building we lived in, a great vase that had held flowers was lying in fragments outside the lift. There was a dead rat among the rubbish. As Emily took the animal by the tail to th
row it out into the street, Professor White, Mrs White, and Janet, came along the corridor we jointly used. They had so far retained old ways that it was possible to say at once they were dressed for travelling — coats, scarves, suitcases. Seeing them thus, all three together, was a reminder of that other world or stratum of society, above ours, where people still presented themselves through clothes or belongings, for occasions. The Whites, as if nothing had happened to our world, were off on a journey, and Janet was saying: 'Oh quick, do let's go, let's go Mummy, Daddy, it's so horrid being here when there's no one left.' Click — there it was again, the few words flung out, emitted as if by the atmosphere itself, by 'it', summing up a new state of affairs that had not yet got itself summed up — or at least, not by me. I saw Emily's shrewd little glance at me, and she even instinctively moved a step closer, in a maternal gesture of protection for what might be a moment of weakness. I stood silent, watching the Whites fuss and arrange, seeing my past, our pasts: it looked comic. It was comic. We always had been ridiculous, little, self-important animals, acting our roles, playing our parts… it was not pretty, watching the Whites, and seeing oneself. And then we all said goodbye, quite in the old style: it was nice to know you, I hope we'll meet again, all that kind of thing, as if nothing much was happening. They had discovered that a coach was going out of the city that afternoon, ten miles to the north, on some kind of official business. Not for the use of ordinary citizens, but they had bribed and urged their way into being on this coach, which would set them down a mile from the airport, with their luggage. An official flight was scheduled for the extreme north this afternoon: again, while no ordinary person could ever get on such a flight, the head of a department and his family might just manage it, if they had the money — astronomical, of course, not for fares, but again, for bribes. What bartering and promises and threats and appeals must have gone into this journey, what a fearful effort — and all of it entirely in the new style, our new mode, that of survival, of surviving at all costs — but not a trace of this showed in their manner: Goodbye, goodbye, it was nice to have you both as neighbours, see you soon perhaps, yes I do hope so, goodbye, pleasant journey.