The Shift Key

by John Brunner

‘Can’t mean what?’ she flared. ‘I told you: no bloody editor is ever again going to tell me I was sitting on a story and lost it! It’s Thursday night! The timing’s perfect for the Sundays! Like Vic Draycock keeps saying, lots of people have heard of Weyharrow who never came near the place! Now hordes of them are going to show up, and reporters will be the spearhead!’

  ‘Jenny –!’

  But she had swung around towards the bar.

  ‘Mr Fidger! Tom!’

  ‘Yes, young lady?’ was his prompt reply as she caught him by the arm.

  ‘That woman on the box just now!’ She pointed at the TV. Rosie had cut the sound again because news had given way to the weather forecast. ‘She was on the coach you were called out to last night?’

  ‘That’s right! And if I’d known her tourists were likely to start rioting and smash its windows I’d have asked Joe Book to stand on guard! Any idea what it takes to break the glass of a coach like that? They must have been carrying hammers in their handbags!’

  ‘Thanks, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.’ Jenny rounded on Steven. ‘See what I mean? Thanks for the dinner invitation, but – no thanks. I must get next to my phone … Oh, shit! I’d forgotten! I have to walk back to my car first, don’t I? Good night!’

  She marched out, leaving a baffled silence.

  ‘Well!’ Colin said at last. ‘All I can hope is that nothing worse happens between now and closing time … Dr Gloze, isn’t it? Would you care for another?’

  His wife cut in. ‘Or would you like something solid? I couldn’t help gathering that you were hoping to take the young lady to dinner. It’s not the same, but I can have a Welsh rabbit ready in two ticks. We keep some frozen, for the microwave. That all right? With a salad, maybe?’

  ‘Yes please,’ Steven sighed. ‘And you’d better lay in extra stock. For all these journalists, you know …’

  7

  ‘Surely you’re not going out at this hour, Mrs Judger – not when it’s pouring with rain!’

  In the hallway of the parsonage Mr Phibson confronted his housekeeper, an umbrella tightly clutched in both her white-knuckled hands.

  ‘After what you said about being taken over by the Devil, I’d rather not spend the night under this roof. So I’m going to my sister’s. I’ve left your breakfast ready, and you only need to boil the kettle.’

  ‘But –!’

  ‘I’ll be at morning service, same as usual. Whether I continue in your employment, though, is up to you.’ She gave a dismissive sniff. ‘Such nonsense I never did hear! Pardon the liberty, but I know where your devils hail from – out of that decanter that you empty much too often, even when you don’t have guests!’

  A dreadful suspicion invaded Mr Phibson’s mind. He whispered, ‘Was it you who telephoned the archdeacon?’

  ‘Someone needed to!’ Mrs Judger snapped. ‘At first I had my doubts, but after what you said at evensong … Shut up in your study, inventing pious phrases for your Sunday sermon, you haven’t heard what’s going on in the village. You’ve set the people by the ears, you know. It’s going to be a scandal. A grand scandal! I promise you, if there’s any more such nonsense, it won’t just be the archdeacon I get on to, but Mr Marmaduke! He may be old, but according to what I hear he’s kept his wits about him better than that no-good son of his who went as mad as you today, and likely for the same identical cause.’

  Mr Phibson stood in bewilderment. He’d rarely heard her make so long a speech before, and every word was like a blow. But resolution and opposition were growing in his mind. He countered sternly: ‘So you don’t believe the Evil One has power?’

  ‘I just know how much you drank this afternoon!’

  ‘But Dr Gloze had some of it!’ Mr Phibson argued. ‘You can ask him – he’ll say I was prescribing it to him, like a medicine … No, Mrs Judger, the Evil One does have power, and it seems he’s made a conquest of your heart! Repent before he makes a conquest of your soul!’

  ‘Good night, Parson,’ Mrs Judger said, turning with a sigh to the door and opening it to the rattle of raindrops. ‘I’ll be in church tomorrow morning, like I said.’

  She marched into the dark.

  Mr Phibson found his right hand raised, and the words of an anathema on his lips. In a ludicrous posture he hesitated for a long moment. Could she conceivably be right?

  But to accept that she was also meant accepting that he himself was deranged, either through over-indulgence – as she claimed – in a harmless and refreshing beverage to which he’d been accustomed since he was an ordinand, or because the Lord had chosen to afflict him with a disorder of the mind. He was no Job, the heavens knew! But was it not enough that both his children, whom he seldom saw, had rejected the Church? Was it not enough that Maud, his helpmeet, had been carried off by emphysema?

  It had to be enough! The Almighty could never punish a faithful servant with such viciousness!

  He drew a deep breath and pronounced the anathema on Mrs Judger, concluding: ‘And may you never darken my doorway again!’

  Afterwards he felt a curious sensation of relief. When he went to bed, wearing around his neck a crucifix he had been given as a memento of his ordination but neglected for at least twenty years, he slept exceptionally deeply, without dreams.

  At Wearystale Flat there had been a bit of an upset, Stick having forgotten to bring home the flagon of cider he had promised. Into the bargain, the kids were trying to stay up long past their proper time.

  But a hug and a kiss, plus a promise of some interesting gossip – she was a great one for gossip – and a whispered reference to the new crop of grass, which she hadn’t yet sampled, sorted Sheila out in next to no time, and a bit of ranting and roaring did the same for the kids while Sheila dressed a salad for her and Stick’s supper. When the girls came to say good night, teeth brushed, faces washed, everything seemed back to normal.

  It must have been the second pint of cider, the one Dr Gloze had bought him, which made Stick look pointedly at the hems of their T-shirts and say, ‘You know something funny?’

  Anxious for yet another stay of bedtime, the girls exclaimed as one, ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sure you were boys yesterday!’

  ‘Oh, Stick!’ – from Sheila, half-choking as laughter met tomato-pips.

  ‘Do you like it better being girls?’ Stick continued imperturbably.

  ‘You’ll kill me with your silly jokes one of these days, you know!’ Sheila reached for her water-glass and gulped a mouthful. ‘You really mustn’t make cracks like that while I’m eating …’

  And then she, and he too, realized that Hilary and Sam were exchanging peculiar glances. They fell silent. Now and then kids just waited for the right juncture to say something crucial, and this felt like such a moment.

  ‘I think I was a boy yesterday,’ Sam said abruptly.

  Hilary crowed with laughter.

  ‘Yes. she must do! Know what she did at morning break? Went into the boys’ toilet!’

  Flushing beetroot-red, Sam muttered, ‘I made a silly mistake, that’s all.’

  ‘I know! You can’t tell left from right, can you? Or read the “BOYS” sign –’

  Sam’s face was crumpling. Sheila said sharply, ‘That will do, Hilary! I’m sure you’ve clone things just as silly as that!’

  ‘Including today,’ Sam muttered resentfully.

  ‘Such as?’ Stick put a comforting arm around her.

  ‘When Miss Wimford told the boys to sing in music class Hilary joined in and sang louder than any of them!’

  ‘I didn’t!’ Hilary cried indignantly.

  ‘You did you did you did!’ – breaking free of Stick and jumping up and down.

  ‘I just thought she said all of us were to sing this time!’ Hilary, to the grown-ups’ astonishment, sounded on the verge of tears.

  Stick flickered an eyebrow at Sheila. It meant: a bad day in school today?

  Her answering grimace confirmed it. He rose. Time to play the heavy non-fa
ther again.

  Well, they seemed to expect it from him …

  ‘So what was all that about?’ Sheila asked as he resumed his chair, this time bringing the old tobacco-tin in which he kept a minimal quantity of grass for making spliffs – just in case of a visit from the fuzz. It wasn’t Joe Book they were worried about; if by this time he didn’t know who in the village was dealing, he had no business being on the force, and ditto-ditto if he hadn’t figured out that at a party the guests who smoked cannabis were more inclined to doze off in a corner than start a fight like the ones who got tanked up on booze, so he and his mates ought to be bloody grateful.

  But harder stuff kept drifting in from Chapminster and Hatterbridge and the south-coast ports, and people who had sampled it kept pestering Stick for speed and even cocaine, which he would have no truck with, so it was inevitable that sooner or later one of his disappointed would-be customers would shop him. He was resigned.

  What had Sheila just said …? Oh, yes.

  Dexterously loading a skin and twisting it into a tube, he said, ‘It’s true. When I woke up today, I was convinced your kids were boys. I must have had a vivid dream.’

  ‘Hmm!’ was her sharp retort. ‘If they were they’d stand a better chance! Men stay out at the pub instead of –’

  ‘Oh, Shee!’ He leaned towards her coaxingly, proffering the first spliff, neater-rolled than those he would make later. ‘We’ve been over that, and I told you I got held up by the new doctor and the girl from the Chronicle –’

  ‘And I still don’t think you have any right to call her a girl! Would you call a man of the same age a boy?’

  Proffering a match, Stick chuckled inwardly. They had been this road before, and every time it had concluded with them intertwined in bed. He looked forward.

  It worked out. There was only one false note, and that a strange one. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Sheila said, gazing past his shoulder at the ceiling, ‘Did you ever dream of being a girl?’

  ‘What …? No, not that I recall. But if reincarnation is true, next time I want to come back female and find out what I’ve been missing!’

  Seeming not to have got the point, she said, ‘I never dreamed of being a boy. Why should Hilary and Sam? Has their consciousness been raised that far already?’

  ‘We can ask them in the morning’ – his breath hot in her ear. ‘Or on Saturday … But not right now!’

  The phone rang. They ignored it. And again later.

  Ursula Ellerford sat in the high-backed leather chair that had been her husband’s. Her sweat-moist fingers were clenched on its arms and she was striving not to cry.

  All around her – and she knew it, she knew it, because she could hear phone-bells ringing either side of this poky narrow house, and across the road as well – all around her was flying the information, the gossip, the news that should have kept her in touch the way the other members of the Weyharrow Society were kept in touch, so that at each monthly meeting they were in the swim while she, who was the voluntary secretary, who organized their visiting speakers and made sure expenses were met and told the publicity group how much they could afford for posters and reminded them to mount their fund-raising wine-and-cheese parties when the bank account was low and cleared up the mess after the members’ sons, drunken louts that they were, had upset glasses and dropped lighted cigarettes or even vomited …

  She was left high and dry, ignorant of what was going on, because of course if anybody invited her, a widow, to one of the almost nightly get-togethers in this village, any wife might imagine she was out to snatch the said wife’s husband, so it was safer not to ask Ursula.

  Even if they did call her ‘poor’ Ursula …

  And tonight was intolerable. Her phone was ringing now and then, maybe because some kind soul or other – Phyllis Knabbe, for instance, who had not a grain of malice in her body – was trying to bring her up to date.

  But she was being forbidden to answer!

  Her two man-tall sons were glowering at the TV, watching a programme she didn’t want to look at and apparently not one they would normally have stayed in for, either. But each time the phone rang one or other ordered, ‘Leave it alone! It’ll be about us. The yobs are after us again!’

  Ursula had asked over and over, ‘But what have you done?’

  So far the answers had always been simultaneous: ‘That stupid git of a teacher!’ and ‘That lying Eunice!’

  It had taken her some time to make sense of the overlapping words. Once she had done so, she requested further details, and was met with grunts and curses.

  In the end she cowered in her chair, realizing by slow degrees how afraid she was of her sons. Even more slowly, but with the inevitable grinding of a glacier, she began to realize she had been equally afraid of her husband …

  And what her sons were doing was treating her as he had.

  She decided that the only safe thing to do was remain absolutely still. Even though the phone was clamoring again, and more insistently, she must not betray that she had noticed it. She took a deep breath and made a heartfelt resolution, and sat still.

  In the hallway of the Doctor’s House the phone shrilled. Upstairs Steven was about to undress, gloomy after his extraordinary evening. Who would have thought that a girl like Jenny Severance was prepared to magnify an aberration on the part of the local parson into a national scandal? It was unworthy of her! Mr Phibson, obviously, needed treatment. How could he be persuaded –?

  Just a moment! If the phone was ringing here, instead of in one of the practices at Hatterbridge or Chapminster which provided emergency cover – Steven knew what night duty he himself was committed to, having taken special care to check after a bad experience in London when he found himself on call night after night without relief – it meant that someone was ringing the private number …

  Jenny?

  Steven rushed downstairs and shouted, ‘Hello!’

  But the voice that answered was male, unknown to him, saying: ‘Doctor? This is Paul Ellerford. It’s about my mother. She won’t move. She won’t say anything.’ He was panting, and it dawned on Steven that he must be very young – at oldest, in his teens. ‘We were watching telly and she just passed out!’

  A shout in the background, which Steven heard clearly: ‘She isn’t dead! I felt her pulse! She just won’t move!’

  Steven heaved a deep sigh, wondering whether he had all the right items in his bag.

  ‘Very well. Give me your address, and tell me how to get to you …’

  After his departure the phone rang again repeatedly. At the local exchange had recently been installed an automatic device to re-route doctors’ calls at prescribed times, referring them from number to number until it struck lucky. Someone, however, had forgotten to instruct it that once a doctor had accepted a call there was a chance he might be out for a considerable while, so it should default to the emergency mode and try someone else.

  Instead, it was under the mechanical impression that once a doctor’s phone had been answered that was proof that he would be there until further notice. Tearful and on the verge of hysteria, other people rang, and rang, and rang …

  Mr Jacksett nearly did, not so much for himself as for his wife Judy. Right up to closing time people had been either phoning or coming back in person to ask indignantly why their request for canned sardines had been met with tuna, or self-raising flour with wholemeal, or long-life milk with apple-juice. Couldn’t he get anything right, when his prices were already higher than the supermarkets’ in Chapminster and Hatterbridge?

  Besides, their kids were fretting dreadfully, because Boyo the dog still had not come home …

  What with that, and the prospect of sorting out the returned goods and replacing them on the shelves – and reflashing everything with the proper price, for they added a penny or two to the cost of items for home delivery to cover what they paid Peter Lodd, the boy with a bicycle who took them round the village after delivering morning papers – both
of them had lost their tempers. Judy had accused her husband, one of the soberest men in Weyharrow, of being drunk because he had taken off a bare half-hour to go to the Marriage where, he said, he hoped to catch and apologize to a few of their regular customers. But it was true that during his absence she had carried on with the job, and he’d stayed out longer than he had promised, and by the time he got back she was ranting about all the food they’d have to eat that would otherwise be spoiled …

  Roy Jacksett, being a stolid kind of person, and used to scenes of this sort if not on such a scale, kept trying to calm her throughout the rest of the evening, to such effect that she drank a second cup of the coffee he had brewed from a jar of instant returned by a customer who’d ordered a decaffeinated brand … and then said she couldn’t get to sleep, so he must bring one of the sleeping-pills Dr Tripkin had given her.

  It had been months since she last asked for one, and the label Mr Ratch had stuck on the bottle said the capsules were only safe until March of this year. Now it was October. Having grown used to discarding stock when its time expired, Mr Jacksett pointed out the fact.

  It was the resulting row that made him try and phone the Doctor’s House; he could see a light on. But there was no answer, and when he went to make apologies to Judy, she was snoring. Much relieved, he joined her.

  But it was a long time before he got to sleep. Where was that bloody dog?

  Business was slack this evening at the Bridge Hotel. Mr Mender decided to close the dining-room early and told Tim Wamble the chef he could clear up.

  Having done so, and changed into ordinary clothes, Tim slipped into the bar for a nightcap. The landlord gave him a look of annoyance – he didn’t approve of his employees mixing with the clientele – but said nothing. Staff were hard to find, and apart from his peculiar lapse this morning Tim had proved hard-working and reliable.

  There were a couple of customers Tim didn’t know talking together in low tones, man and wife by the look of them, and another that he did, Mr Ratch the chemist, a roly-poly man with thick glasses and a shiny bald pate. Most uncharacteristically, he was indulging in a succession of pink gins that had unlocked his tongue.