Around and around and around: if I had let him die, then all of us, so many people, would have been happy, but I could not do it, and therefore …
And what would happen to Ben now? He already knew about the half-derelict buildings, the caves and caverns and shelters of the big cities where people lived who could not find a place in ordinary homes and houses: he must do, for where else could he have been during the periods of days, or weeks, when he was gone from home? Soon, if he was often enough part of great crowds, part of the element looking for excitement in riots, street fights, he and his friends would be known to the police. He was not someone easily overlooked … yet why did she say that? Everyone in authority had not been seeing Ben ever since he was born.… When she saw him on television in that crowd, he had worn a jacket with its collar up, and a scarf, and was like a younger brother, perhaps of Derek. He seemed a stout schoolboy. Had he put on those clothes to disguise himself? Did that mean that he knew how he looked? How did he see himself?
Would people always refuse to see him, to recognise what he was?
It would not, could not, be someone in authority, who would then have to take responsibility. No schoolteacher, or doctor, or specialist had been able to say, “That is what he is”: neither could any policeman, or police doctor, or social worker. But suppose one day someone who was an amateur of the human condition, perhaps an anthropologist of an unusual kind, actually saw Ben, let’s say standing on a street with his mates, or in a police court, and admitted the truth. Admitted curiosity … what then? Could Ben, even now, end up sacrificed to science? What would they do with him? Carve him up? Examine those cudgel-like bones of his, those eyes, and find out why his speech was so thick and awkward?
If this did not happen—and her experience with him until now said it was unlikely—then what she foresaw for him was even worse. The gang would continue to support themselves by theft, and sooner or later would be caught. Ben, too. In police hands he would fight, and roar and stamp about and bellow, out of control with rage, and they would drug him, because they had to, and before very long he would be as he had been when she had found him dying, looking like a giant slug, pallid and limp in his cloth shroud.
Or perhaps he could evade being caught? Was he clever enough? These mates of his, his gang, certainly were not, giving themselves away by their excitement, their elation.
Harriet sat on there quietly, with the television sounds and their voices coming from next door; and she sometimes looked at Ben quickly, and then away; and she wondered how soon they would all simply go off, perhaps not knowing they would not return. She would sit there, beside the quiet soft shine of the pool that was the table, and wait for them to come back, but they would not come back.
And why should they stay in this country? They could easily take off and disappear into any number of the world’s great cities, join the underworld there, live off their wits. Perhaps quite soon, in the new house she would be living in (alone) with David, she would be looking at the box, and there, in a shot on the News of Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, she would see Ben, standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia, in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays.
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THE INFORMATION
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“Satirical and tender, funny and disturbing … wonderful.”
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The Fifth Child Page 14