Cryptozoic! (14 page)

Most of the life of the place was concentrated in and about a drinking
house, half a dozen doors up the hill from the church, its worn front
step lying about on the same height as the guttering round the roof of
the church. The only sign of its function from outside was a small sign
over the porch that read THE FORGE INN * ALES. It had stood and would
stand there a long while, for Bush, even in mind-travel, was unable to
walk through its walls, and had to go through the doors like a legitimate
customer.
There was little life or light inside the Forge Inn. In the one bar, men
sat on benches, their boots firm-planted on the sawdust floor. Several of
them smoked cigarettes, few had anything to drink. They were all dressed
similarly, in dark clothes, with thin overcoats buttoned tight even in
the shelter of the pub, and cloth caps on their heads. They even looked
somewhat alike, their faces somewhat eroded, their expressions sharp
but guarded.
One of the men drinking sat at a small table alone. Although the other men
greeted him as they came in or left, they did not sit with him. He was
dressed in the same poor manner as they, but his face was rounder and
possibly had more color. It was on this man that Bush centered his
attention, for he believed the man to bear his own name, Bush.
When the man finished his drink, he looked round as if in hopes of some sort
of diversion, found none, rose and handed his empty glass to the landlord,
and said a general goodnight. It seemed there was a murmured goodnight
in return, although no sound could penetrate to the isolation of Bush's
position.
He followed his namesake outside. The man clutched his coat collar tight
round his neck, bowed his thin shoulders, and started up the hill, Bush
after him. Bush observed that the floor on which he walked, following,
followed closely the contour of the street, so long was it established.
At the top of the hill, the man stopped by the small grocer's shop
and went round to the back of it. Invisible to him, intangible, Bush's
modest tent was pitched in his back garden, among the weeds and cabbage
stumps. He knocked at the back door and was admitted. Bush slipped in
after him.
He had noticed when he first wandered dazedly through this village that
a notice hung in the window of the grocer's -- a simple house window,
the conversion of which to trade had been effected by the removal of
curtains and the insertion of a pile of bars of red soap and a stack of
cans containing corned beef -- and on inspection, the faded lettering
of the notice read, "Amy Bush, Grocer, Etc." Although he was unable
to determine why the instinctive drives of mind-travel had directed
him here, he believed that his namesake would provide a clue. Indeed,
he wondered if these Bushes were possibly ancestors of his.
The back room in which he found himself was crowded to the point of madness.
Three small boys of varying ages were running and skipping about --
shouting, although not a decibel leaked through the entropy wall to
Bash. The smallest of these lads, who was also the palest and sharpest, in
that his bones seemed to protrude painfully all over his body, was naked
and wet; in resisting the attempts of an elder sister to capture him and
return him to a big metal bath, he scampered wildly back and forth about
the room. These gambits brought him into collision with a buxom woman
in bedroom slippers who was washing a garment at a stone sink, and with
an aged lady, evidently the grandmother of the family, who sat with a
blanket over her knees in one corner of the room, chewing her false teeth.
The man Bush had followed up the hilt waved his arms and was seen to be
shouting savagely. The small sharp boy returned to his sister, who lifted
him immediately into the bath, while the bigger brothers threw themselves
down on some wooden packing cases that formed a sort of pew along the wall
behind the inner door, and lapsed into apathy. The buxom woman at the sink
turned to the man to demonstrate to him how thin and patched was the shirt
she scrubbed at; this movement enabled Bush to see that she was far gone
in pregnancy.
Bush was unable to estimate the age of the daughter; she could have been
anywhere between fifteen and nineteen. Her figure was developing and her
hair pretty, but her teeth were not good, and a lack-lustre air added to
her attitude and expression an unpleasant reminder of the few years that
separated her from the old chewing woman in the corner. Nevertheless,
she smiled at her brother as she scrubbed him, toweled him efficiently,
and eventually, with marginal aid from her father, shooed the three boys
upstairs to bed.
The sleeping arrangements were of the poorest. The smallest boy slept
with his parents in a double bed, beside which a palliasse accommodated
the two other boys. This was in the larger of the two pokey rooms under
the roof. In the smaller, there was barely enough space for the single
bed in which the daughter slept with her grandmother.
The man emptied the bath tub into the garden. When his daughter returned
from upstairs, he sat her lovingly on his knee and worked at the table
over some accounts, on which his wife eventually joined him. The daughter
was content to put an arm round her father's neck and lean with her
cheek against his head.
This was the Bush household. In the days and weeks that followed, Bush came
to know his namesakes well. He learned their names slowly. The expectant
mother, who ran the shop, was Amy, as the sign in her window declared.
When the old grandmother hobbled down the hill to the post office, Bush
read from her pension book that her name was Alice Bush, Widow. When his
namesake stood in the dole queue and thrust his cards through a window
for stamping, the ghostly Bush peering through his shoulder discovered
that this was Herbert William Bush. The girl's name was Joan. The two
older boys were Derek and Tommy. Bush never discovered the youngest
child's name.
He soon found that the village was called Breedale. A Darlington
newspaper, blowing fitfully downhill in the wind gave him the date:
March 1930. He had mind-traveled to within 163 years of the time he
found it convenient to refer to as "the present." Here he would be
unlikely to find Silverstone; equally, he would never be found by any
Gleason agents, should they come looking for him. So there was safety
here, but he wondered again at what sort of direction-finding device had
brought him here. It was the aspect of mind-travel that most baffled him;
something equivalent to the migratory instinct in birds had delivered
him to 1930, and he had yet to fathom its function.
The over-riding preoccupation of his mind was neither this purpose nor
his safety, but something to which it reverted continually without Bush's
being able to contain it. This preoccupation was like an eddy in a stream,
to which everything passing by is attracted and eventually becomes trapped
there. Whatever he thought, whatever scene in Breedale he mingled with,
his attention was drawn back to the brutal way in which he had beaten
Lenny up with the golf clubs. That white room in the barracks was always
with him. He saw the high blind window, heard the thud-crack as his
iron connected with the rib cage, felt the impact of Lenny's heel on
his shin as the tersher rolled over in agony, saw the blood souse over
the floor. He recalled the over-heated look on Stanhope's face, as well
as the look of disdain on Howes' as the latter left him at the door of
the torture room. He knew he was degraded; although he had never thought
in theological terms, he saw himself being in a state of sin. Breedale
was self-exile.
This state remained with him over the ensuing weeks like a dirty taste
in the mouth. He would have been an outcast in Breedale because of it,
even had he not been isolated behind the entropy barrier.
He made no attempt to redeem himself from his own beastliness. It was like
a tangible thing. He could carry it about like a hump and be satisfied
that it was a burden. What he had done had been the worst act of his
life -- and he preferred, in his present self-condemnatory mood, to
regard it as the climax of his life rather than an aberration following
his bout of military training -- as something that really deserved the
day of exile in the garden, when the red-hot pokers had overtopped him
and his mother had proved she did not love him. That punishment fitted
this crime. Typical that they should be reversed in order, as if he
symbolically lived his life backwards, muddled in spirit from start to
finish! In his tent in the 1930 garden, he sometimes tried to weep; but
a sense that to offer any token of softness would be spurious in someone
who so gladly had beaten up his victim checked the tears, leaving his
eyes dry and hard like a window pane.
In front of that pane, the inhabitants of Breedale performed their own
individual dramas. He thought it as well he could see only the outside
of them.
For some while, in an incurious way, Bush was baffled to know what the
people did by way of a living; they seemed as much divorced from reality
as he was. He drew out his answer like the dole, by bits.
Only after he had mooned about the village for several days did he realize
the function of the grim collection of buildings on the other side of the
railway lines. It was a revelation to realize that this was a coal mine.
In his own day, coal mines still operated in various corners of the world,
but they bore little superficial resemblance to this crude site.
A path wound behind the mine. One day when the spring came, Bush followed
young Joan along it. She had a boy with her, a youngster almost as pale as
she, who held her hand when they were out of sight of the railway station.
They walked past the gaunt and silent mine, in which no one left or came,
and a few sparrows round the pithead quarreled over the shortage of
nesting materials.
The path led to a river; the scenery became beautiful. Trees grew here,
putting out their greenest leaves; one hung over a stone bridge, a grey
bridge that carried the path across the river to fairer banks beyond. Here
Joan suffered her boy to kiss her. They remained for a moment in time,
staring with hope and love into each other's eyes. Bush thought with
longing hunger of the Permian, where the early amphibians crawled about
like wounded things, so free from the love and hope and hurt that clogged
human centuries.
Overcome with shyness at their daring, the boy and girl walked on.
They spoke with some animation; their observer was pleased he did not hear
what they said. The path led to a stone wall and meandered along beside
it. Joan and the boy stopped here, leaning on the wall and smiling at
each other. After five minutes, they turned back the way they had come.
Bush remained where he was; he did not wish to see them kiss again,
as if kisses were golden pledges. He was, after all, at an age when the
certainties of youth had left him.
He looked over the stone wall at a fine house set amid park and garden,
well situated in the valley. The wall had stood for so long that he
had to climb it to get into the grounds. He walked through ample and
well-tended vegetable gardens, and arrived at the rear of the house.
So he came to the local manor, and discovered the Winslade family which,
at this period of its history, was almost as subdued in its manner as the
inhabitants of the village. Wandering like a phantom about their grandly
appointed house, he gradually realized that they owned the mine. The
knowledge affronted his common sense, since he was badly read in human
history and could not understand how one man or family could possess
such a natural product of the Earth as coal.
The days fell away. Bedeviled by his own guilt, Bush was slow to realize
that the whole neighborhood was crippled by a strike of long-standing.
The rust on the padlock of the main gate of the mine was a symbol of the
general paralysis. Although life moved, making more pronounced the
bulge under Amy Bush's apron and softening the winds across the moors,
the affairs of men were at a complete standstill. Now Bush thought he
knew why he had arrived here; it was a case of empathy.
He settled in the garden behind the grocer's, living frugally on his food
concentrates, and the weeds grew high, unhindered by the shadowy substance
of his tent. The grocer's shop was well situated for custom. Neighbors from
the stone-built houses came here, while it attracted the custom of all the
flimsier houses over the ridge above it, whose occupants preferred not to
bother to walk down to the larger shop near the pub at the foot of the
hill. But there was little custom now; the customers were increasingly
short of money as the strike dragged on, and the Bushes were more and
more unable to extend credit; they had to pay their wholesalers. Bush
understood that Herbert was a miner in better times; Amy ran the shop
on her own. When he first came on Herbert, the man went cheerily into
the shop, helped clean it, whiled away long strike hours talking to
his wife's customers. In a few weeks, however, the customers became
less talkative and clearly vexed at being allowed to have nothing on
account. Herbert began to smile less, and took to staying away from the
shop. He induced his daughter to go on long walks over the moor with him;
once Bush followed them some of the way, watching their two silhouettes
on the bare skyline, the girl's tagging farther and farther behind; but
Joan clearly did not relish these walks. When she gave them up, Herbert
gave his up as well, and took to standing about in the sloping street
with the other men in creased trousers, saying little, doing nothing.
One morning, there was a meeting outside the church, and the owner of the
manor came and spoke, standing with half a dozen officials on the raised
walk by the church while the men crowded in the road. Bush had no way of
knowing what was said, but the men did not go back to work. He was cut off
from his surroundings. Yet in his growing emotional evolvement with them,
he saw something to be preferred to the situation that had prevailed in
his own time, when he had been in touch with events, able to influence
them, and yet had felt emotionally isolated from all that went on.