Cryptozoic! (15 page)

Amy was growing nearer her time. She spent most of her day in the shop,
which was barer now, and dusty. She seemed to have abdicated from the
family; Joan was left to look after grandmother and children. Nor did
she pay any attention to her husband, who in turn stayed more and more
away from the house. They were strangers to each other.
Only in the evenings did Herbert return, when Joan was there. Although
she worked harder now, the girl carried a little of spring in her cheeks,
inspired perhaps by her boy friend. Now that his wife was so unresponsive,
Herbert seemed to need more and more attention from Joan. He helped her
wash the children and undertook to get the daily breakfast of tea and
bread and jam. Amy retired to bed early, before the old creaking grandmother
went, and then Herbert would put his arm round his daughter's waist and
draw her down to look at the ailing accounts of the shop; sometimes he
gave the figures up altogether, sitting clutching the girl's hand and
staring into her eyes. Once on these occasions, Joan said something in
protest and pulled herself away as if she would leave the room. Herbert
jumped up and caught her and kissed her as if to placate her, but when he
got his arms about her, she slipped déxtrously away and ran upstairs.
Herbert stood where he was a long while, at one point staring about him
with an expression of fear on his face so ghastly that Bush also took
fright, alarmed for a moment that he might through some magical agency
have become visible to the man; but it was in Herbert Bush's own mind
that the object of his fright lay.
The boys grew more neglected, fishing in the stream or playing with other
little hooligans in the gutter. Amy lived in her shop, often regarding
her husband as if she had never seen him before. Prompted by Herbert's
interest in his daughter, Bush recalled what someone had said long ago
about incest: that the tabu on it which began primitive man's isolation
from his fellow hominids had led to the growth of individual consciousness,
from whence sprang all civilization. If endogamy had been still the rule
in 1930, Amy and Herbert might have been first cousins, or perhaps even
brother and sister, in which case a lifelong acquaintanceship might have
made them less strangers to each other now.
One outward cause of their trouble revealed itself on a day when Bush had
been down at the lower end of Breedale. He now knew everyone by sight, and
was interested enough in their affairs to spend much of the day moving in
and out of their dwelling places, absorbing with equal relish both that
which had a period and that which had an eternal flavor. Returning to
the little grocer's, he saw the weekly wholesale delivery van standing
outside it; by now he had been here long enough to recognize the name
of the Darlington firm on its battered side. Entering the shop by the
front door, Bush found nobody inside. He walked through to the back --
by now his identification with the era was so close that he no longer
went through objects if he could avoid doing so -- and found Amy and
Herbert closeted with a stranger, a plump man in a smart suit who was
rising from the table, hat in hand, tucking some documents into an
inside pocket. Bush did not care for the look of him, and noted that he
was smiling in a strained way, whereas Amy had broken down on her side
of the table and was weeping. Herbert stood helplessly behind his wife,
clutching her shoulder.
A legal document lay on the table. Bush glanced at it before Amy took it up.
From the little he saw of it, he gathered that she had had to sell her
business to the larger firm. Presumably they had grown too much in debt
for her to take any other course. He looked down at Amy, feeling the
shock and sorrow of it.
The plump man found his own way out. Amy sat at the table and stifled
her tears while Herbert paced about, two paces one way, two the other.
Amy recovered herself and stood up, saying something to Herbert in a
brusque manner. He replied, gesturing. At once, they were in the midst
of a mighty row, perhaps the grimmest they had ever had. By her gestures,
which included a lot of pointing down the hill, Bush gathered she was in
some way including the mine in her abuse -- the mine that with its dark,
closed alleys underground bulked large in all their lives.
The row grew more violent. Amy snatched up a lesson book from the table
and flung it at Herbert. She was too close in the tiny room to miss;
it hit him in the corner of the mouth. He leaped at her, grasped her
with both hands about the throat. Bush threw himself forward, fell
through them with his hands waving, and struck his head a blow on the
chimney breast. As he staggered to one side, Herbert threw Amy to the
floor. Then he ran out of the back door, slamming it behind him.
Bush leaned against the wall on which he had struck himself. It felt at once
glassy and rubbery, like any object through the entropy barrier. He clutched
at his air-leaker, breathing painfully. His head rang, but already he was
glad he had jumped instinctively to the woman's aid. He opened one eye
and gazed down at her. She was doubled up with the pangs of birth.
Forgetting his own woes, he hurried out to the street. Nobody was about.
The hour was two in the afternoon, when everyone sat in their parlors
pretending they had lunched adequately or in the pub forgetting they had
lunched inadequately. The Bush children had disappeared; nor was there
any sign of Herbert. Nor -- he realized it almost as soon as the emptiness
stopped him -- could he attract anyone's attention if he did see them.
He located Tommy and Derek playing with a couple of fellow hooligans in
an old derelict railway truck standing on the edge of the sidings.
The smallest boy was nowhere about. Granny was sitting in a garrulous
neighbor's kitchen. It was an hour before he found Joan. As he might
have guessed had he not been in such a distressed state of mind, she
was sitting in a little back room talking with two girl friends. He
stood and looked. She was so meek, so unassuming -- and so far from
guessing that her mother lay at home in agony. She and her friends went
on talking and talking, their pale lips moving all the while; sometimes
they smiled or frowned, occasionally aiding the meaning of what they
said with a small gesture. And what were they all saying, so long ago,
so hopelessly embedded in time? He knew her life through and through,
had watched her in her bath, had seen her asleep, had spied on her first
kiss. She had nothing to talk about, nothing worth recording even on
such a dead afternoon. What was it all about?
The question extended itself until it embraced all human history. It
seemed to Bush that throughout his life he had asked it too often,
while nobody else had asked it enough. His damned memory -- he recalled
an ancient day far in the backlog of his own days . . . or a young day,
whichever it should be, for he could have been no more than four. . . .
The dentist had built a little sandpit for his son to play in. Son had
built a great castle and driven a tunnel through it. Son had flooded
tunnel and moat with water from his (red, with yellow[?] handle)
bucket. Conveniently, son had found beetle in nearby flower bed. Son
had put beetle in toy boat with sail. With slight push, boat had ridden
through great swirling cavern with beetle gallant in bows, looking
every black inch a captain. Questions, then and now: What was beetle
really? What was son really? What really determined their roles?
And the "really"; evidence of some standard outside the consciousness? God
in disguise? God like an all-consuming alien entity from another galaxy,
digesting all beetles, flowers, worms, cats, Sons, mothers, so that it
could greedily experience life through all their beings?
Well, that was more or less the traditional answer to the question of the
mystery of life in his part of the globe. Then there was the scientific
answer, but after a while that too fetched up against the blank wall of
God. There was the atheist answer, that it was all blind luck, or ill luck.
And a hundred other answers. Perhaps they all had the problem back to front.
For a second, a dizziness that had nothing to do with his bruised head
overcame Bush. It was as if he had almost laid his hand on the key to
the whole matter; but he thought he remembered feeling like that before;
the confusion into which he could throw himself seemed the nearest he ever
got to clarity.
Empty-handed, he came away from the talking girls.
Outside, the sun shone, although it did not reach him. Summer hovered on
the threshold of Breedale. He was standing among the poor houses that
abutted the moor. In one or two of their gardens, brave efforts had
been made to create beds in which to grow a few flowers or vegetables
to fill the hollow cookpots; but the moorland had stubbornly resisted
such economy. He wandered over the crest of the hill, staring down at
Breedale as he had often done before, and saw Herbert Bush.
Herbert was tacking up the hill, almost home. Bush recognized at once that
the man was drunk. He ran down the slope to meet him, ran beside him,
but he was a ghost, nothing, and if Herbert was psychically disturbed
by his presence he showed nothing. He was red in the face and blowing,
muttering to himself. For most of the afternoon, he must have been down
somewhere in the village, drinking with a crony. Now it looked as if he
were returning to give his wife a bit more of his mind. He flung open
the back door and discovered her sprawled on the tile floor.
At once Herbert shut the door behind him, so suddenly that Bush, coming
close behind him, jumped back and was shut outside. He could only peer
through the tiny window over the kitchen sink, a helpless, exiled,
Peeping Tom.
Amy had moved. She had apparently heaved herself up onto a chair,
and then fallen off again as her pains crippled her. Now she sprawled
foreshortened, and the chair was pulled down over her face and chest,
one arm entangled with its legs. At some point, she had torn her garments
aside. Her dead baby lay between her legs, not fully born. Herbert flung
himself on the floor beside her.
"No!" Bush gasped. He pulled back from the window, leaned his throbbing
head against the glassy wall. She could not be dead! You didn't die so
simply. Oh, yes, you did, if you had suffered from long under-nourishment,
if you struck yourself on the table as you fell, if you were trapped in a
whole skein of adverse economic, historic, and emotional circumstances;
you died fairly easily. But her life -- she couldn't have been born for
this squalid end! The promise of her girlhood . . . her marriage even
a few weeks ago she had seemed happy, despite everything.
It made no difference.
He was startled to find Herbert's face glaring out of the window at him.
It had lost its flush and was ashen -- appeared even to have lost its
shape. Bush realized that the man was not looking at him. He was seeing
nothing, unless it was the mess of his life; and with one hand he was
reaching up to the little shelf above the sink on which he kept his
washing and shaving tackle. He brought down his long cut-throat razor.
"Herbert, no, no!" Bush jumped in front of the window, tapped uselessly
on the glass, which felt malleable to him. He waved, he shouted. And
before his eyes Herbert Bush cut his throat, drawing the blade from his
left ear almost to his right.
The next moment, he appeared at the back door, razor still grasped in hand.
Blood cascaded over his shirt. He took three steps into the garden, knee-high
in cow parsley, and collapsed among the creamy heads of the weeds,
his body half-covering Bush's phantasmal tent. Bush was running away
in terror.
It was as if the tragedy that occurred in the Bush family was an historical
necessity. The whole village chipped in their pennies for a fund for the
children, the whole village paraded to the cemetery behind the church.
Even the lord of the manor sent one of his mine managers to represent
him; possibly Herbert held a good position at the pit. Some of the men
spoke to the manager afterwards; the union was brought in; discussions
were restarted. The ghastly deaths had jolted everyone from their sullen
apathy. They were prepared to negotiate again. An agreement was reached.
Only four days after Amy and Herbert Bush were buried, the men were
streaming down the hill in their working clothes again, they were being
carried down in the primitive cage into the earth, they were hewing
away at the fossil trees that had themselves been above the ground in
distant days.
Bush stayed in Breedale, to see Joan take to her job as assistant in the
shop, working under a man employed by the wholesalers who had bought the
business, a man who rode in on a bike every morning from another village
down the valley, a scrubbed, efficient, smiling man in an uncomfortable
collar, a promising young man. A neighbor looked after the Bush boys
during the day. Grandmother fended for herself. Now that the weather
was fine, she was able to sit outside her back door in a hard chair --
which she evidently resented, since neighboring grannies not cursed
with grocer's shops could sit outside their front doors, thus viewing
the street and its activities.
It was Bush's main concern to watch over Joan. In a year or so she would
be old enough to marry the boy who still courted her -- the boy who was
now working down the pit for the first time. Bush could discover no
indication that she ever thought of her parents. He wondered if it ever
entered her head that her father killed himself in a moment of unbalance,
not from sorrow but from guilt -- but if it did, she and he would be
the only ones to think it.
So Bush seemed to have reached a dead end, and gradually he was forced
to revert to his own predicament -- only to find, somewhat to his surprise,
that his ego had repaired itself. He accepted that the shock of
finding his mother dead, followed by the grueling military training,
had temporarily occulted his reason.
At the same time, shreds of moral discipline, surviving buried but unharmed
from an earlier period of his life, prompted him to think that he must
in the future be more a force for positive good. He believed he had been
through enough bad to recognize its opposite.