Caltraps of Time (15 page)

‘Fourth-generation: the latest of my ancestors to cross over was a great-grandmother of mine. And Menga knows of none of her ancestors that were not born Inside ... Where
is
that woman? Still gossiping with the other wives back there ... By the way’ (with a wry smile) ‘our burial mounds are becoming too thick on the ground, as the old fade out. We shall have to build them further off, and on barren ground. I must raise the matter next Council... But here is your house. I shall try and pluck Menga from the old wives’ party! Good day to you, and fine hunting.’

‘And a good crop to you!’

In the Outside, the Hard of Hearing heard the volcano begin to rumble for the first time in living memory.

<>

~ * ~

The Show Must Go On

I wander through each [censored] street

Past which the [censored] times do flow,

And at my back satanic hear

Marx’ millions grind exceeding slow.

On the first stroke the little procession of gilded figures stepped out, strutted round the silver circle and disappeared on the final stroke of thirteen. The tourists gazed; one man took a film sequence. Some of them moved off, others started idly chatting or consulting charts. The Down’s syndrome case tried to sell matches at the corner; no one was interested. Piitasan, who had glanced up at the figures on the tower, now went on with his argument. ‘It’s all a matter of statistics, Eitshi. If their quota isn’t up, there have to be redundancies here.’

‘There’ll be trouble, Piit,’ said Eitshisun, picking his way over a meths drinker who was lying half in the gutter.

‘Well, we just can’t carry the labour force if we can’t produce. Our margin isn’t that safe.’ Piit paused to admire a set of figurines in tinted crystal, set on glass shelves and lit from concealed sources below, in a shop window. ‘Exquisite, but at half a doz each they’re too dear.’

Further conversation was blotted out by a brass band which swept down the street. Behind it came a gear-grumbling cortege of held-up vehicles. As these thinned out, Piit began to speak again but his words were cut short by two shots. From a high window opposite a man pitched down into the crowd. He fell onto a well-upholstered elderly lady who was knocked to the ground, sustaining a badly sprained shoulder and extensive bruises to her face and body. A little boy made off with her handbag, but, making too hasty a getaway, ran slap under the wheel of a long-distance bus. The passengers in the grounded bus went on discussing in pairs their symptoms, their home neighbours, and the outrageous price of meat. The handbag remained under the bus.

‘Noisy here,’ said Piit.

Eitshisun looked at his watch, a reflex gesture really since thirteen had so recently struck. ‘Must be off now,’ he said. ‘So long. Thanks for the lunch.’

He turned a couple of corners, passing Maadj, who was discussing with Younis how to cook rinsettes. Younis prided herself on her cuisine and Maadj was really angling for tips. She found time, however, to flash Eitshisun a brilliant smile, and watching this rather than his step, he knocked into Benkt, who was propelling a middle-aged spastic in a wheeled chair. Benkt spent all his spare time and half his small income taking human wrecks for an outing, or otherwise relieving their lot. ‘Sorry!’ called Eitshisun and swept on. Benkt just saved the spastic from being tipped out, but twisted his own arms so severely in doing this that he had, reluctantly, to call off good deeds for a week, and barely managed to propel the poor man back. However, he felt sure he would be well enough to look forward to spending his holiday in three weeks’ time redecorating the homes of some aged widows who were bedridden. Younis, who was meeting her husband Kevn for lunch, parted from Maadj. She found him at the Brushnish, and did his arteries a bad turn by being catty about the menu. Kevn had already had a trying day at the office. However, the balance was nearly restored when she let him buy her two of the crystal figurines at Frassy’s. This was by way of being an anniversary present. At the counter alongside two elderly women were complaining to each other about the new numerical system. ‘All this duodecimal nonsense is quite unnecessary, Maatheh,’ said one. ‘Just gives them a chance to rook you right and left. And measurements! I can never remember that one point six is one-and-a-half span.’

‘I know, dear. And those weights. I got a shock when I weighed myself, I thought I’d have to go on a diet.’

Outside the shop a group of youths was kicking a boy in the stomach. The noise he made swelled to an unpleasant volume as the pair with their parcel of figurines came out of the shop door. He began vomiting blood and Kevn had to steer Younis carefully past to avoid soiling her tights. A sandwich man passed down the road bearing a placard announcing ‘Dance at Mazy’s’. The Down’s syndrome case was still trying to sell matches. Younis slipped him a half, but declined the matches. He was still gaping disconsolately after her when the youths, who had got tired of kicking the boy (who was now unconscious), came by, knocked his tray of matches over his head and pranced on roaring with laughter.

Stepping over the unconscious boy, Vall and Matte were discussing the decatonic piece they had heard last night. A pair of acrobats advertising next week’s nude circus came down the pavement on their hands, not naked, however, but dressed in luminous psychedelic scarlet and green.

Maadj stopped at a stationers’ to pick up a woman’s magazine with a large section on beauticare, two moralistic and one etiquette-wise advice columns, a celebrity interview and three sentimental stories. She was about to turn up the alley but heard screams and saw that two thugs were raping a girl there, so instead walked on down the main street where a queue of stolid middle-aged women in their best furs were waiting, perspiring in the sun, outside a Stingo hall. Next door a boy on a motorbike had just flung a Lermontov cocktail into a fish-fry place kept by a coloured family, and roared off as the shop went up in flames. ‘Serve ‘em right,’ one of the prospective Stingo players was saying: ‘It’s a shame,’ said another; nobody moved. Down the road came a little procession carrying banners saying SOLIDARITY WITH THE MIATVEN LIBERATION FRONT. One banner was held by a toddler in a pushchair. Further down, the college was in a state of siege, from one per cent of its students, who had proclaimed in large letters splattered over its walls that they wanted abolition of exams, total control of the syllabus and free contraceptives on the premises. Below its steps, a child of seven was selling flags for Poxfam. Just beyond, a girl of eight, hesitating, was being invited persistently into a car by a stranger with an ingratiating leer. A traffic warden, who had at first suspected him of being about to park illegally, tramped on reassured. Maadj, who was thinking about her beauticare, walked steadily round the corner and past the green, noting idly that building was going on at lightning speed there, no doubt with the object of forestalling legal objections. The art museum, hung about with mobiles, wrecked machines and chopped-up posters, was round the second bend. Finally she got to the local bus stop and queued up. The queue was very long and after twenty minutes someone in the queue suggested that another lightning strike must have broken out. The queue dispersed and after a long hunt Maadj found a taxi which she had to share with two other occupants, one of whom was going three miles east, the other some four miles south. As Maadj’s home was five miles west and she was the last to get in, this delayed her considerably. Moreover, the taxi had to dodge a couple of minor riots and two corpses. Its radio produced a soothing line in cool jazz, interrupted by some rather spastic observations on the firm’s intercom. During the last three miles the driver regaled her through all this with his (until recently) unprintable opinion of immigrants. Maadj, however, paid little attention — she was peeping at her magazine’s beauticare section.

Paying off the driver at the chemist’s to buy some of the products she had just read about, she was treated to a long discussion on the weather, which was wet and cold, according to the chemist, though Maadj privately thought it was muggy but on the whole dry. Eventually she got away and turned into her drive, stepping over the pile of cartons and sweet papers discarded by passers-by.

The telephone was ringing as she let herself in but it was only an obscene caller. It had occurred to her that it might have been Vall ringing, so when she had replaced the phone she rang up Vall herself.

They had a long talk about curtains, cats, Vall’s children’s latest sayings, the garden and the guinea-pigs. ‘What on earth’s that noise?’ said Vall at one point.

‘Hold on, I’ll see.’ It certainly had been ear-shattering. Maadj put down the phone and walked over to look up and down the street out of the room windows. Presently she came back to the phone. ‘Only a crash, dear; I hope they get it cleared up before Henn comes home — it’s on the corner. Go on about your mower, darling.’

The driver with his chest stove in was slowly dying. The motorcyclist, his neck broken, lay twenty yards away against a lamp post. The lady from the back of the car was vomiting over the cuts on her face, which was dangling out of the door window. The child of five, on the car floor, was screaming thinly and continuously. The car engine was a total wreck, the bike a tangled mess half wrapped round it. Eventually an ambulance showed up.

Vail, reminded of the guinea-pigs by the conversation, went out into her garden to see how they were getting on. She found them lying dismembered on top of their cage, which had been broken into. After some reflection she buried them herself, with much trouble, in the bed behind the shrubbery, so as not to upset the children too much when they came home. Then she tried the TV.

Programme 5 was showing the football match at Blovno. The ruined buildings gutted in last week’s invasion could clearly be seen in the screen, and tanks ringed the stadium. Our team appeared to be winning, and the commentator remarked that it was hard luck on the Blovno team, who had had to find three substitutes in a hurry for three of their best men, shot two days ago by the invaders. Vail, who was not interested in football, switched to Programme 6, which had a fascinating critical discussion on the anti-literature ‘poems’ of Mikfursan. Unluckily the children burst in just before this finished, and had to be told something of the guinea-pigs’ fate.
The Exploits of Pinpin
on the screen consoled them somewhat, after which they switched to
Treble Loot.

Matte left his store and walked to the multi-storey car park, found his car intact, and started down the ramp in it. His car radio was announcing two more hijacked planes. In front of him on the ramp was a little Angula; Makisun, the driver, was thinking about the model of St Polters at home that he had been constructing for three years out of used matches. Behind Matte, on the other hand, was a Minima driven by Boruz. Boruz was sweating a little because he had just carefully set fire to five wastepaper baskets in Matte’s store before closing it. In the next car behind, Tommis was promising himself a fortnight studying the habits of a family of foxes in the Old Forest. Behind him again drove Abut, a lecturer who was in the middle of writing a history of tithes. The exit bar rose successively before them and they drove their several ways. Opposite the exit, heroin powder was being passed to a little group of schoolchildren by a middle-aged man.

Next morning Maadj, cooking the breakfast, heard the usual religious broadcast. A fervent voice was extolling the beauty of God’s handiwork in Nature and the tenderness of mother love in birds and animals. While he was speaking, millions of parasitic wasps were laying eggs in live caterpillars, millions of spiders and mantises were devouring their mates, millions of tapeworms were growing segments in human and animal guts, millions of living beings were infected, infested or otherwise overcome with degrading and bestializing diseases, millions of elderly humans were declining in various degrees of long drawn-out indignity and stupor, and millions of travesties of humanity were being born. Of course there were other human wrecks, from car crashes, from boy racers, from heroin and other drugs, and there were other deaths in varying agony from the tanks of Bluntville SA, the tanks of Kingiz Camp, the tanks of Bedapusht, the tanks of Blovno, the bombs and petrol jelly of Miatven, the starvation in Polyafra and Infrasia, the riots, the fires.

Henn had a train journey to make that morning. As his train passed them, the sun shone on the car cemeteries. Henn was reminded of a film of Belschwitz, the piles of shrunken cadavers. His arrival platform was covered ankle-deep in debris, the excretion of the overcrowded human rat, human race, rat race, fouling its rat-runs. Matte, driving in by his car, heard more or less accurately on his radio the opening pseudo-Dies-Irae phrases of the Drum-Roll symphony give place to the confident optimism of the main body of the first movement. He parked in the multi-storey car park and took a bus to his store, to find it gutted. (His house telephone had been ‘out of order’ all last night, cut by a would-be cosh burglar who had been interrupted by the cars arriving next door for an orgy.) Boruz, ostensibly as concerned as the others, was gaping at the smoking shell.

Eitshisun went by train but never reached his destination. In his compartment he was writing notes for a vital conference of mid-morning, when he was hurled through the window as the train was derailed owing to the prank of six youngsters (who were watching the outcome of their handiwork from a bridge overhead). That was the end of his life and that of one hundred and twenty-six other passengers. (The conference, ill-balanced, went the wrong way, provoking a strike, putting thousands out of work and causing two suicides.) The youngsters, gleeful but scared, scattered before they were spotted and were never identified.