Chapter 12
Morning was heralded by a cacophony of platform announcements, the flutter of circling pigeons and the hiss of the python chatting to the struthiomimus. I looked across the tiled floor at Beta lying spread across her seat, head resting on her arm and eyes that were wide open and staring at me.
“I thought you were never going to wake up!” she said with a mocking smile. She swung her body round, ran her fingers through the long tangles of her green hair and rested her feet on the floor. “It’s getting ever so much busier now!”
Although in the tedious hours of the night, I had longed for morning to arrive while listening to Beta’s gentle breathing and the distant sound of unidentifiable machines, the seat now had never seemed more comfortable nor the prospect of continued sleep more welcoming. Nevertheless I prised open my eyes and tried to focus more clearly in the bright neon light that had never dimmed at all, although there was enough natural light streaming through the windows for it to be superfluous.
“What do we do now?”
“Let’s see more of the City!” announced Beta jumping up and frowning at my recumbent figure.
My tongue tasted the sour rawness of my mouth and my fingers carefully detached small grains from the corner of my eyes, while just behind my forehead a persistent thud was commanding me back to sleep. However, I knew there was no prospect of that, regarding the commuters sitting around with their business suits and rolled umbrellas. I followed Beta as she pushed open the glass door to the waiting room and confronted a greater density of people running backwards and forwards than I had ever seen before. I was pressed against the wall by this whirl of activity, anxious of losing sight of Beta who strode fearlessly ahead.
The jostling flow of commuters, - many no doubt coming from the Suburbs, -marched forward in determined haste towards the signposted underground stations and bus stops. Watches were glanced at, newspapers tucked under arms, tickets stuffed back into wallets and eyes set dead ahead with contempt for all distraction. Beta preceded me through the tall portals of the railway station, past newspaper vendors yelling in staggered unison “Latest Election News!” and “Election Latest!” I dashed after her and caught up with her outside where she stood unabashed and unembarrassed staring around her.
The City was all that I’d imagined it being and more. All around and towering high above were the tallest buildings I could imagine. A narrow corridor of blue sky ran parallel to the road below. People bustled by in two streams of motion on the wide pavements, separated by a slow, nearly stationary, procession of buses, taxis, lorries and cars. Above and passing between and through the tall buildings were monorail tracks from which trains were hanging and standing commuters stared at the pavements below. At street level, shop windows were displaying clothes, electrical goods, robotics, leisure facilities, foreign holidays, luxury lets and anything else that someone with substantially more money than I could afford. Dotting the pavement were advertising boards, bus-stops, litter bins and traffic lights.
“I just can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it!” uttered Beta again and again as she surveyed the scenery. “And this is just a tiny corner of the City! How can there be so much? So many! So ... oops!” A pair of diatrymas jostled past her and caused her to fall forward slightly. I caught her by the arm before she was trampled underfoot.
“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. Somewhere not by the station. It’s bound to be busy here.” I looked at a signpost illuminated by a stick figure with a purposeful stride. “How about Her Maphrodite’s Royal Palace?”
Beta agreed. We followed a stream of commuters, at the same rapid pace, dodging the feet of the odd beggar or other figure sprawled out in front of the shops, and constantly in danger of being knocked down and under the crowd ourselves. All we could see, smell or hear were the backs of commuters ahead of us and the fumes and noise of the impatient traffic.
Eventually, the push of the crowd lessened and we were in a much quieter area adorned by older but no less splendid buildings. The enormous skyscrapers and attendant monorails were supplanted by palaces and town houses circumscribed by high walls, towering railings and tall trees.
“Let’s stop!” commanded Beta breathlessly, pausing by an elm tree and a pair of peacocks chatting to a couple of anacondas. She gazed through the railings of a majestic building guarded by soldiers in blue uniforms and bearskin hats, who were marching with eccentrically held rifles. As they approached each other from opposing directions they performed a pantomime with their rifles, spun around and marched back in the direction from which they had come.
Most of the people in this district were carrying cameras and wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with such words as I © The City. The building that was the object of their attention and the focus of their cameras was an architectural montage of styles from every period imaginable. Corinthian arches, Palladian pillars, round domes and grandiose glass windows framed by magnificent velvet curtains. All of this was beyond high golden railings, forbidding guards, several furlongs of concrete and ornate lawn, and a towering row of flag staffs with the blue, red and green standards of several nations waving slightly in the breeze.
“Doesn’t this make you feel proud to belong to this country?” commented one of the pair of peacocks standing by us, a videocamera strapped around his neck. “Don’t you just feel awed by it all?”
“It’s very impressive!” admitted Beta. “Do you think Her Maphrodite might be in residence?”
“On the day of a General Election? Of course!” enthused the peacock. “Someone’s got to be on hand to give the new Prime Minister constitutional authority. Where would we be without Her Maphrodite? It just makes my feathers preen!” He splayed out his orange-eyed feathers. “I just feel sorry for foreigners. They are so deprived. They don’t have a monarch to look up to as we do. No wonder they envy us so much and clamour to immigrate in such vast numbers!”
“Is it possible to approach any closer?” wondered Beta, grasping the railings in her hands.
“For the likes of us, of course not! Royalty have to stay apart from the mass of ordinary people. It wouldn’t do to mix their blue blood with the debased genes of commoners! They’re over there. And we’re over here. And that’s the way it has to be!”
“I see,” contemplated Beta. “Are they really so much better than us?”
“Someone has to be. And royalty have more entitlement than anyone else!”
The peacocks returned to their serpentine companions who were wrapping themselves around an ash tree and lifting themselves as high as they could to get a better view of the palace grounds and the stiffly marching soldiers. Beta and I stood against the cold iron bars with the crush of tourists behind us and the broad empty space ahead, in which the soldiers performed their unchanging rituals and the flags gently fluttered.
We left the palace and the tourists who, even this early in the morning, were amassing in increasing numbers to glimpse at this world of privilege. We drifted into a precinct of magnificent shops where people in fur coats, jewellery, pearls and gold watches strolled by in total indifference to the majority of the population who were admiring goods they could never afford through massively thick plate glass windows. I certainly couldn’t afford the ten thousand guinea suits, the ten million guinea watches, the five hundred guinea silk ties, the four hundred guinea packages of caviar, chocolates or game fowl, the cars in excess of two million guineas and quite modest portraits at several hundreds of millions of guineas. These numbers, with their long string of zeroes, were shocking to me, but even more so to Beta.
“Even the newspapers cost more than five guineas!” she exclaimed. “In the Village, a newspaper costs less than a groat! How can people afford them?”
“I imagine they must earn more money in the City,” I remarked, but still awed at the cost of a bar of chocolate at three guineas, a packet of cigarettes at thirty guineas and cassettes at n
early two hundred guineas.
“How much do you have to earn to be able to afford what some of these people have!” Beta exclaimed, indicating some rather fat men in opulent and ostentatious clothes. One man was smoking from a cigar nearly as long as his forearm and disdainfully flicked ash over a boa constrictor sitting by a cardboard sign which read in scrawling biro: Cold & Hungry! Please Help! The snake squirmed to avoid the ash. “Did you see how much one of those fur coats cost? It would feed the Village for hundreds of years! Where does all this wealth come from?”
The answer to Beta’s question was perhaps provided after we had walked beyond the expensive shops; the hotels guarded by smart looking security guards in anachronistic uniforms; the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and golden carriages parked outside lavish buildings; and the women sporting luxurious fur coats and snakeskin handbags. Tall buildings reappeared, but taller than ever: marble, concrete and glass towering higher and higher. At the top, eagles and condors circled on the up-draughts from the slow-moving traffic below. The buildings had large plaques outside, often set in small grass plots adorned by statues of both modern and antique origin. The names gave me no doubt that this was where in the City there was most wealth: the Country and City First Agricultural Bank, the National & Provincial Assurance Society and the Bank of the New Canine Republics. Each building housed a bank, an insurance company, an investment group or other financial institution. Although only the reflection of other buildings could be seen through the glass windows, I imagined rows upon rows of clerks and computer screens, frantically ringing telephones and stock brokers frenziedly shouting at each other as trillions of guineas were exchanged across international time zones and between other financial centres. Beta was very impressed by my suppositions.
“I’ve just never thought about money like that before!” she remarked, gawking up at the anonymous windows on the highest windows. “Are you saying that these buildings contain trillions of guineas of money? That must take up an awful amount of space unless they’re stored in very large denominations. Perhaps they have billion guinea notes. That would be an awful lot of 0s! Would that be nine? Or twelve?”
“I don’t think it’s actually stored as money,” I explained further. “It’s nominal rather than actual money. I think it’s really just stored as data on computers. The trading is in the form of digits shifting up and down as credit is moved from one account to another.”
“What’s the point of that? Why can’t they just leave it where it is?”
“It’s to make profit. If the money moves about a lot it somehow becomes more on the way. I don’t know how that works. I think the money is invested into businesses and so on...”
“So, when my father borrowed ten shillings from the bank to buy a new donkey, and paid back a shilling a month for a year that makes the bank profit. I can see that. So they must loan out an awful amount of money. It’s a wonder they have any left!”
“I don’t think that’s the only way that money accrues profit though,” I remarked watching a couple of magpies in business suits trot up the steps into the Two Brothers Insurance Company building. “I think that some of it is made from buying things at one price and selling them again at another price. There’s a lot of profit to be made if the volumes of the sale are particularly huge. If you buy a billion guineas of pig iron and sell it at a profit of 0.1 % you make a profit of a million guineas. Whereas if you bought only ten guineas of pig iron and sold it at the same profit then you’d only make 2¼d. Hardly worth the effort!”
“Do you mean they’ve got a billion guineas worth of pig iron in these buildings? No wonder they’re so big! I can’t begin to imagine how heavy all that would be.”
“It’s not that they’ve actually got all the pig iron they buy. It’s just a transaction done by computer. The people who trade in pig iron probably never see any at all. They also trade in the anticipated values of things in the future, promises to pay by governments that no longer exist, the likelihood of things happening or not happening, the relative differences between the value of money in one part of the world and another, or anything that will part people from money.”
“That sounds like nonsense to me!” sniffed Beta. “You say that all this wealth is made from things that may or may not exist now or in the future, which you probably wouldn’t really want anyway, and is only stored as electrical or magnetic impulses on enormous computers. What’s that got to do with the real world? How does all that give you food to eat or clothes to wear?” She gazed at the shadows of the buildings on each other, and the walkways hundreds of yards above where more besuited people were walking above our heads. “Then why do they need such enormous buildings?”
We strolled on through the streets, which were extremely busy, even now long after most people had arrived at work, with employees rushing in and out of tall buildings clutching files, brochures and documents under their arms or between their teeth. There were bowler hats, striped shirts, braces, dress-suits and stilettos jostling past us on all species of worker, all entirely intent on their destination. The eyes were always fixed ahead and regarded us only as obstacles to be sidestepped.
“How many banks are there?” Beta wondered as we paused to let two vultures dash by in urgent conversation, tiny bowler hats covering their bald heads and umbrellas tucked under their wings.
“Not that many really!” remarked a tall pigeon about our size who was standing nearby and pecking at a bag of seeds he supported in a wing. “I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I just couldn’t help overhearing you. All this ridiculous wealth: trillions and zillions of it in less than a cubic mile of the City. It’s enough to make you spit! What do they want so much of it for? And what is it for but to build even more of these enormous buildings, push up the land rental to extremes you just can’t comprehend, and push out all the honest hard-working Citizens like me who will never ever see the smallest iota of this wealth. And where are we to go? The East End slums? The distant Suburbs? Have you any idea how expensive rent is in the City?”
“None at all,” I admitted, as we huddled against the Commercial & Lambdeth Union & Friendly Society to avoid being stampeded under a rush of shirt-sleeved young men led by a couple of hinnying hyenas in psychedelic braces. “More than in the Suburbs I imagine.”
“You’ll be lucky to get much more than a room the size of a toilet cubicle for less than five thousand guineas a week. That’s a week! And how many people living in the City earn the sort of money they can afford that kind of expense? I consider myself fortunate to take home just enough to get by. There are plenty whose earnings are less than six digits.”
“That’s still an awful lot!” gasped Beta.
The pigeon glanced at Beta. “You would say that! I guess you must come from the Country. You have coins smaller than a crown there I believe. And you can even buy things with them! But to many working in this financial district, like those noisy louts who just passed by, anything less than nine digits is considered an admission of failure. For them it’s just money, money, money. And what do they spend it on? Champagne. Gambling. Fast cars. What do you think of that?”
“I suppose if I had a lot of money like that there would be quite a few frivolous things I’d like to buy,” mused Beta. “It’d be quite nice to have more money than I need.”
“It certainly would be!” chirped the pigeon enviously. “I would just love to know that my salary cheque would see me through the month comfortably, with no risk of my bank balance going into the red! But what makes it so unfair - so terribly and utterly unfair - is that all that money which piles up as a result of all this financial wizardry and wheeling and dealing eventually goes to shareholders who haven’t contributed anything to this activity but capital. Capital, moreover, that they have mostly just inherited. Only those who already have obscene quantities of wealth can invest money and make money.”
“Is that how it works?” Beta wondered. “Rich people put in a lot of money and then get a lot more out.�
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“Essentially, yes. And there’s a kind of sliding scale. The more you already have the more you’re going to make.”
“So ...” Beta reflected, “the rich get richer and richer. What about people who’re not rich? Don’t they get richer too?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so for one minute! These financial institutions aren’t working in the interests of the poor. Why should they?”
“If there’s only so much wealth in the world and more of it is going to richer people, then there must be a drain from somewhere else,” I remarked.
“Only if there’s only a fixed amount of wealth in the world,” the pigeon replied. “All this prosperity is based on the belief that the world’s wealth will just go on growing for ever and ever. And because of that, people say that it isn’t just the rich who benefit. Everyone else does as well.”
“That sounds silly!” Beta pointed out. “How can things just keep growing forever? Surely there must be a point at which it just can’t grow any more. And then what happens? Do the rich continue to get richer and everyone else gets poorer to finance them? Do the things which used to make money stop making so much money in future? And can’t it all go into reverse? Maybe all these buildings will just crumble into the ground and we’ve used up all the world’s resources?”
“I don’t know. I’m not an economist. I just live here.”
The streets of the financial district eventually gave way to an area of shops, restaurants and cafés at the foot of buildings that still towered above us, but seemed less remote and threatening. The hustle and bustle eased, but there was still the ubiquitous roar of traffic. By now, like everyone else, we were no longer really seeing the people we passed by. Their very numbers had somehow robbed them of personality.
Even though it was still some time till midday, diners were greedily eating in the restaurants and cafés. We peered through the window of a restaurant to see two pigs facing each other over a table loaded with plates of the most exotic and rare foods which they shovelled into their mouths with a constant unbroken rhythm. A waiter approached and poured them each a glass of wine which they picked up in their trotters and drank immediately in one mouthful, so requiring a further refill. One of the pigs noticed us and made no attempt to avert his gaze. His jaws clumped again and again on a sinuous trail of meat which dangled out of his mouth while rich sauces dribbled down the dark pink folds of his chin and mixed in the kaleidoscope of stains on the cloth table napkin tucked into the collar of his striped shirt.
“There’s enough food there to feed my Village for a month!” gasped Beta. “How can they eat so much? There must be much much more food than they could possibly need!”
The pig lost interest in us and returned to his food with relish, plunging his knife and fork deep into its entrails. His companion had not once paused his gorging, but the likelihood of him finishing before his companion was lessened by the waiter bringing in more plates of food. Looking at so much food awakened Beta’s appetite, so we wandered past restaurants selling meals at thousands of guineas a head until we found a small, comparatively inexpensive café where a cup of coffee cost less than ten guineas. The décor of the café matched the relative cost of the coffee, with only a few very uncomfortable wooden stools lined along a small counter facing onto the street outside. I paid for two coffees with several grimy pound notes which the anaconda serving was initially reluctant to accept, while Beta reserved two seats for us just next to a pair of teenage boys and a couple of small minotaurs. I lifted myself up onto the stool and looked through the plate glass window, past writing in Cyrillic and Arabic, to the never-ceasing crush of pedestrians outside. It was somehow relaxing to watch this world go by, knowing that, temporarily at least, we were not a part of it. The coffee however didn’t taste at all pleasant and was not especially warm. The addition of tasteless milk from the sachet or sugar cubes in paper covers did nothing to improve the taste nor the temperature.
“What do you think of the City?” I asked, putting down the cup and trying to ignore its taste. “Is it all that you expected?”
“There does seem to be an awful lot of it!” she remarked. “Much more than I thought. Anna was right. The City does make Lambdeth seem terribly provincial. And I thought that was big enough. Everyone seems to be terribly busy. Dashing around with some mysterious purpose.”
“Not everybody!” I commented, pointing at a pair of ground sloths who were slumped over a table, idly peering at tabloid newspapers with the headlines Reds Do Better than Expected and Her Maphrodite’s Aunt Eats Hamsters. Beta turned her head round, a curtain of hair flopping down to her knees.
“Those two don’t look busy either,” she said indicating a couple of crocodiles who were sitting impassively, barely even blinking, with full but probably cold cups of tea on the table in front of them. It was difficult to believe that they were in fact real living people, but it seemed implausible that anyone would bring in two stuffed models and set them there. “I suppose not everyone in the City has a lot to do.”
“If you were unemployed then neither would you have!” sharply remarked one of the boys sitting next to us, who like Beta wore no clothes.
“You mean they might not have jobs?” Beta remarked.
“Not everyone has, you know!” the boy continued. “You come from the Country don’t you?”
Beta nodded.
“My brother and I did as well. We thought: come to the City and get rich. Even the unemployment benefit is several hundred times more than you could ever earn in the Country. But it doesn’t last. Money just doesn’t go anywhere here. And if you haven’t got a job, what can you do? Just sit in cafés like this and watch life go by and just wish you had a chance to join in.”
“Surely there are plenty of jobs here,” I commented. “If that wasn’t so, why do so many people from the Suburbs commute here to work?”
“There are jobs for them!” the other boy remarked. “That’s why the City wants them. But farm labourers like us, what can we do that we’re qualified for? There are only so many jobs available for our like. And so many people crowd here from all over that the jobs soon go. And then all you do and all you’ve got energy to do is spend your time surviving. And in between the visits to the dole office and going to bed, what else can you do? Just watch things go by.”
“I really envy those crocodiles,” the first boy continued. “They can take the boredom. I don’t know how they do it! Hours these reptiles can spend doing absolutely nothing. I suppose it’s just their make up.”
“But surely even without money there are things to do?” Beta wondered. “My father’s always saying he wished he had more time not looking after the farm animals and tending the crops. All the books you can read. All the things you can see. All the creative things you can do.”
“It’s not like that!” sniffed the boy. “You just don’t understand. That’s what you think at first. But one day becomes another and time goes by. No job. No money. And it becomes a trap you get into. Soon you just get resigned to it.”
“I just can’t believe you can’t do anything. It must be very boring!”
“It is! It is!” the boy agreed.
“It’s inevitable though,” his companion said. “If everyone was busy then for those who can afford to do things there’d just be no space to do them. The City needs people to do nothing or it would just have no space left. It’s people staying at home, out of sight and out of mind that keep this place functioning. If everyone was active, going to cafés, writing novels and so on, everything would just seize up.”
We finished our coffees and strayed again into the street which had become no less busy for our absence. As we walked past more restaurants and shops, my feet were getting very weary and Beta’s feet had become almost black with the dust and grime from the pavements. Occasionally, we had to stop for her to detach a small patch of darkened chewing gum or mushed cigarette end from her soles. It was on one such occasion, while Beta was trying to shake a
disgusting plastic stretch of gum from her fingers, that we heard a loud commotion. Beta looked up sharply to see a pair of wolves who were baying at a couple of bulls in track-suits.
The abuse was quite explicit and extremely personal. As the accusations were so bizarre and disgusting they must have been grounded on speculation rather than firm evidence. One of the bulls retorted with an angry snort by butting a wolf with his head. This triggered a sudden and startling flurry of violent action which at once froze the flow of pedestrian traffic in its track. The wolves leapt onto the bulls, teeth and claws at the ready, while the bulls circled round and around with menacing impulsive thrusts of their long horns and their tails slashing out like whips at the wolves on their backs.
Most pedestrians either turned back or crossed the road to avoid the violence. Some braver ones gingerly passed by along the kerbside. More disturbingly however, several pedestrians decided to participate. A pair of weasels wearing jeans and tee-shirts produced flick-knives and jumped on top of the bulls. A thickset boa constrictor sprang onto one of the bulls and pulled its body around the bull’s neck. The violence was beginning to draw blood. One of the bull’s horns was reddened at the tip and a wolf was viciously thrown against a restaurant window which withstood the impact but caused him to slide unconscious onto the pavement.
“This is horrible!” exclaimed Beta, showing more presence of mind than me. “Let’s go!”
She pulled me away and we headed down a busy street perpendicular to the one we’d been on. As we hastened along, a large sparrow chirped at us with something of a chuckle in his voice: “Quite a scrap, eh!”
“I’m sorry? What did you say?” I asked.
“That fight! Lots of blood, eh! Not the most violent I’ve seen but pretty good anyway!”
“Good!” retorted Beta, clearly distressed. “What could be good about that?”
“Well not good, so much. But pretty violent. Not the worst, but bad enough. I’ve seen a lot of violence in the City. You do, you know! You just do. You can’t avoid it. It’s everywhere. The City is a violent place!”
“Is it?” Beta asked, looking at the mass of people passing by.
“Look at that police officer!” The sparrow continued, pointing with a wing at a savage looking ceratosaurus in a uniform nestling a small automatic rifle in his arms. “Don’t tell me that he carries that around with him if he doesn’t think he needs it, eh? This is a violent place. Rapes, ultraviolence, gang bangs, mass shoot-outs, everything. Often the pavements are just red with blood after an especially gruesome gangland killing. Business leaders get shot point-blank through the head, their brains splattered over spaghetti and lasagne. Pubs get blown apart with small incendiary devices. Cars get stolen and plough down innocent pedestrians on the pavement. Arguments are settled in a blaze of gunfire. Buildings are set alight and their inhabitants tied to chairs to prevent them escaping. People are chosen at random, followed by assassins and their entrails torn out of them. The City can be pretty violent, eh!”
“I’m sure it can be,” remarked Beta, with an expression of some distress. “We must be on our way though.”
“Well be careful as you go, eh!” the sparrow remarked as Beta hastened us along the shop-lined street at quite a stride.
“I hope we don’t see very much of this violence,” I commented kindly. “It’s not very pleasant.”
Beta flashed a quite angry glance at me. “I don’t want to talk. Or even think about it,” she enunciated slowly and firmly. I scampered along behind her, belatedly aware of the distress she’d felt on witnessing the fight.
The road we walked along was brightly lit by neon, despite it being early morning, and we passed cinemas, shops and other places of quite a different character than those we’d passed before. GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! one screamed out in orange neon with a window covered with pictures of naked women of all species engaged in some very peculiar behaviour. Naked Encounter promised another. Topless and Uninhibited a bar advertised.
“I don’t like this area at all!” remarked Beta, slowing her rapid pace and walking closer to me as if for protection.
Scantily dressed women, but none of them dressed as naturally as Beta, gazed at us surlily from shop doorways, and through red-lit windows, which, if they were shops, were either selling decor for those with a distinct preference for the colour red and a preponderance of satin and silk, or (more likely) the services of the semi-clad women who pouted at us as we passed by.
“I’ve never heard of any of those films,” I remarked pointing at the neon titles of a cinema. I’m Coming On You. Sexy Serpents. Two Is Not Enough. Twelve Hours Of Passion.
They don’t look very nice, do they?” remarked Beta stopping in front of the cinema and looking at the explicit pictures of innumerable different sexual practices between various species who exhibited more than a hint of pleasure in their faces. “Look at that! How can anyone do that? Do people actually come here to watch films of that sort of thing?”
I looked around me. There were still quite a few people in the street, but actually rather less than in most of the City. There was also less traffic, but the vehicles were still driving by rather slowly. People of all species, but mostly male, were entering and leaving shops through plastic strips that only partially obscured the rows and rows of videos, magazines and other objects displaying a preponderance of naked flesh and sexual organs. The words Sex, Flesh, Hard Core and the letters XXXX seemed to adorn almost every building that wasn’t a residential block.
“I don’t like this at all!” Beta asserted, though seeming strangely excited at the same time. “Let’s leave here as soon as we can!”
She strode on, and I followed as close behind her as I could, ignoring as best I could the curious calls from the more human women who stood in shop doorways in little more than their underwear. My ears burnt with embarrassment while the pressure against the inside of my trousers was somehow reappraising my feelings towards Beta in a way that I couldn’t claim to be proud of.
Beta steered us off the main roads down some quite narrow roads, framed on either side by the windowless hulk of tall buildings, but it was not long until we felt lost and longed to return to the relative comfort of a more populated street. The few people we passed seemed somehow menacing and unwelcome, however innocuous they might otherwise appear. We zigzagged across the roads to avoid them, huddling together for protection. It was very dark in the shadows of the buildings on all sides, and despite being nearly midday on a sunny day it seemed more like twilight.
Our nerves, already on edge in this unfamiliar and threatening locality, were further troubled by what appeared to be the sudden and shrieking scream of a large bird.
“What was that?” gasped Beta.
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, I don’t want to find out! Let’s go!”
The scream came out again, and this time it sounded much more like someone shouting in distress.
“I don’t think that’s the right thing to do at all!” reproved Beta sternly. “If someone’s in trouble we ought to try and help.”
She strode off in the direction of the scream and, abashed but still reluctantly, I chased after her.
We followed the punctuated cries around a series of anonymous buildings and narrow streets as they became gradually more distinct. “Get off! Ow! Leave me alone!” The calls were soon identifiable as coming from a woman.
Beta broke into a run and I picked up my pace to stay within sight of her. We turned a corner past black plastic rubbish bags and decrepit cardboard boxes, and were confronted by the sight of a young woman struggling in the grip of a large pig wearing a uniform and a conical hat.
“Leave her alone!” commanded Beta with authority.
The pig turned round, holding the woman’s arm in one of his trotters, revealing that he was a police officer. He contemplated us standing there.
“Just leave her be! She doesn’t like being held like that!”
I couldn’t help marve
lling at Beta’s steadfastness of purpose in confronting someone who if he so chose could probably make our lives very unpleasant. The police officer was also rather impressed, and simply released his grip so that the woman slumped sloppily onto the pavement. She was sobbing and weeping forlornly. I noticed for the first time that she was quite severely pregnant: a large round belly whose distended navel swelled out from beneath her stretched tee-shirt and hung over her ragged knee-length skirt.
“The City has a policy of discouraging vagrancy,” the police officer said in his defence.
“I’m sure the girl is quite discouraged now!” Beta replied, bravely conciliatorily. “If you leave her with us, we’ll ensure she’s looked after.”
“Very well!” remarked the police officer, clearly quite embarrassed as he fastened his belt together round his rotund waist. He looked down at the pregnant girl who was huddled in a piteous state, her shoulder-length hair over her face and her hands supported on her bare knees. “Don’t let me find you begging again,” he ordered her unconvincingly, “or the full weight of the law will descend on you!”
He then pocketed his truncheon, turned around and strode off down the narrow streets, leaving us behind.
Beta raced over to the girl, bent down to her and drew her sobbing face to her bare breasts. I stood helplessly by, feeling somewhat redundant and removed from the drama.
The girl raised her thin, high cheekboned face and stared at us through tears and their silver reflection on her cheeks. “Thank you! Thank you!” she repeated between sobs.
She was in a very sorry state, and not just as a result of her recent assault. Her hair was matted and unwashed; her clothes were smudged and torn; her feet were bare and black with the muck of the pavement; and her skin was discoloured by a mixture of dirt and bruises. Her face was the very image of suffering. “He was horrid! Horrid!”
Beta looked up at me with a sad smile.
“We’d better get her out of here.”
She turned back to the girl.
“What’s your name? Where do you come from?”
“Una. My name’s Una,” the girl sobbed. “I don’t come from anywhere. At least not lately. I used to live in Unity. Beyond the Country. But I don’t live anywhere now. Thank you! Thank you! That horrid pig! Just because I’m so poor. I’ve not lost my humanity, even if I have lost my dignity. It was horrible! Horrible!”
Wordlessly, Beta lifted Una to her feet and gestured to me to help carry her. She was not too badly harmed by the encounter, although some of the bruises on her arm were quite fresh and tender, and she hugged her bare stomach with anxiety. She was very light, despite the extra weight she carried inside her, and would normally be very thin. Her wrists were nearly half the thickness of Beta’s and her legs were of almost childlike proportions. She was also slightly shorter than Beta. Her hair was very pale despite the patches of dirt that darkened it.
As we supported her and walked slowly along the back streets in the hope of finding somewhere to rest she continued sobbing: ruing her luck and reflecting on her recent assault.
“It’s because I look such a rag doll! It’s because I’m so filthy! Even the police think I’m fair game! Just a victim to be victimised again and again!”
“I’m sure that’s not true, Una,” remarked Beta comfortingly. “Nobody’s meant to be a victim. No one has to be abused.”
“Yes they do. Yes they are. And I’m one,” Una sobbed with understandable self-pity. “And here I am with the child of a rapist in my womb wandering the desolate City streets; sleeping in dark alley-ways under newspapers and cardboard; drinking soup at soup kitchens and eating the rubbish left in waste-paper bins. I’m just as low as you can get! Any lower and I’d be dead!”
“Don’t be silly,” Beta said reassuringly but without conviction. “There’s always worse than the worst you’ll ever know.”
We emerged into the relative brightness of an open street in which there were the comforting arcades of shops and the hustle and bustle of people. The streets here were nonetheless quieter than most we’d seen up to now and the shops were correspondingly more mundane, but still more spectacular than any that would be seen in Suburban shopping centres.
“There’s an empty bench,” I said indicating one facing across the road at the stream of traffic roaring by. “Let’s sit down.”
“Good idea,” agreed Beta.
We sat on a hard plastic bench between a waste-paper bin and a signpost, much defaced by pen-knives and decorated with arcane graffiti. Jim ©Julie read the graffiti between my knees. We set Una between us, but she leaned heavily on Beta’s shoulder and stroked her arm idly while talking not so much to us, or to anyone, but for the sake of talking.
“I’ve lost all my pride. You do, you know, when you’re at the bottom of the heap. I’ve done almost anything to survive. Begged, borrowed and even stolen. You have to. You’ve got to eat. You just want food or something to drink all the time. It fills your thoughts. I never thought eating would be so important before, but now that and sleep are the two most significant things in my life. If it’s not where to get food, it’s where to lay my head at night. You can’t believe! I envy the wealth of all the people who pass by as I sit begging on the street with a cup or empty sweet box. I just see them as sources of income. I hate them when they don’t put even the smallest guinea or crown in my box. Why can’t they help more? I say. And when they give me money I’m grateful, sure, but I think why don’t they give me more? What can a guinea buy you in the City? What can even a hundred guineas buy you?”
“Not very much by the look of it,” I remarked, looking at the prices of three or four guineas marked on discarded sweet papers on the ground beneath my feet.
“The money I get in a day’s begging in the City would be plenty in Unity, but then it’s all gone. A cup of coffee in a café, if they’ll even let me in, a few rolls, perhaps some clothes. When there’s only food and sleep to look forward to, you particularly cherish sleep. It’s cheap and readily available, even if it’s taken me a long time to get used to sleeping rough. At first I couldn’t sleep at all. I ached all day long from the pressure of the pavement beneath me. And I’m so vulnerable too. A lone girl with no friends in the midst of an enormous unfamiliar city. Men always try to take advantage of me. Despite me being pregnant! But I’m a nice girl. I’m not like that! But that’s just not sufficient for them all, as you saw with that disgusting pig! God! I hate him! Why me? Why do even law enforcers think that I can be treated with such brutal disrespect? I hate him! I hate the City! I hate everything and everyone!”
She paused and then suddenly burst into a flood of tears. Beta put her arm around her, and then looked up at me.
“Isn’t there somewhere better than here to sit? It’s not very comfortable or private.”
I looked up at the signpost. The image of a striding man marching in the direction of the City Park looked quite promising. I mentioned this to Beta.
“Parks are very relaxing places in the Suburbs. It’s much better than sitting here with all these people jostling by.”
Beta readily agreed, so we persuaded Una to stand up and we walked slowly along the street in the direction indicated by the signpost. As we proceeded, we passed more shops and a few department stores, but what I thought particularly odd was the number of large television screens lining the exterior of the buildings. They all featured different stations, but all showed similar images of suited people talking to other individuals down padded microphones. I pointed this out to Beta.
“Is television all you can think of?” Beta upbraided me harshly, but she raised her head and looked up at the images. “Oh! It’s the Election results!”
“The Election?” I remarked. I’d totally forgotten the big event of the day. “Is it now?”
“Well, it’s already taken place you know. I didn’t vote of course - I wasn’t registered in Lambdeth - but I’d have voted Green. Did you vote?”
“No. I wasn�
�t anywhere near the Suburbs. Who do you think has won?”
“Well, let’s find out. You don’t mind, do you Una, if we watch the Election Results?”
“No, of course not. Of course not. Though it won’t make any difference to me who’s elected. All those different parties. They’re all the same, aren’t they?”
Beta looked as if she would like to disagree, but she restrained the urge and instead stood by a tree with Una leaning heavily on her shoulder and me standing beside her. Many pedestrians also stopped in their tracks and gazed at the television screens, where on all of them different newscasters of different species in similar attire faced the camera with faces admixed with the excitement and solemnity of the event. The television screen we were nearest showed two characters, one a cobra with glasses and the other human.
“We are now authorised to announce the results of the General Election,” the cobra spoke slowly and reverently. Behind him was an inset picture of several flags of different colours and the images of significant politicians, one of whom I recognised as President Chairman Rupert.
“They said they’d give the results at midday,” whispered Beta excitedly.
“It’s been an exciting and hectic Election,” the newscaster continued. “The most important there has probably ever been. An Election which has seen opinion polls swing widely from side to side, up and down, and topsy-turvy. An Election which has seen the active campaigns of the Red Party and the Blue Party overshadowed by the controversies surrounding the Illicit Party and, more usually for General Elections, the Black Party. An Election which has seen the White Party cornered again and again for a firm statement of policy and ideology, and has marked the increasing significance of the Green Party.” Beta slightly squeezed my arm at that brief mention. “However, it is official. The results have come in and we are able to announce them. So, Gilbert, what are they?”
The other newscaster raised his head from the piece of paper he had in front of him. “Thank you, George. Yes the results are in. Results which signify the final disu
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