Mum was the lively one. If I loved her less than Dad, I trusted her more; it was to her that Teddy and I turned for decisions and permissions and the drying of tears. She sang songs and filled the house with the colours of joy; she charmed Dad’s moods by teaching him dance steps on the little back porch until his two left feet brought them to a staggering halt in laughter and love.
Teddy resented her joy in anyone but himself; he would turn his back on their happiness, denying it. I think they were unhappy about it, but never mentioned it where we might hear.
But were they so unhappy with him? Teddy was the golden boy (a small thing, but he was always ‘Teddy’ and I the more formal ‘Francis’) with Mum’s brilliant handsomeness. And Dad’s moodiness. I bored him. When our rare open quarrels occurred he would circle his finger at his temple and call me ‘figure farter’ and stride off, leaving me raging and feeling obscurely contemptible.
It did not enter my mind that his contempt masked jealousy of my one talent, an inability to bear with my outclassing him in anything at all. I did realize that his needling was meant to trick me into explaining how lightning calculation is done; he believed that I wilfully withheld the secret from him, but I could no more explain it then than I could now.
How describe sound to the deaf, light to the blind? Numbers have shape, invisible but apprehended by the mind. Set this shape against that shape and together they make a different, product shape. The answers are always right because when the mind can see them it is not possible to be wrong. Do you understand? Nor do I.
It seemed a useless talent. Every adult had his wrist cally for instant answers or could use a triv terminal for complex mathematics; only quite old people remembered how to do sums with pen and paper. Dad wasn’t yet that old but he did know how to work sums on paper, which was lucky for me – it made my future possible. My miniature talent – miniature because undeveloped – was at first unknown to myself. I supposed all kids could do as much if they wanted to.
Revelation came on the night when Dad dropped his wrist cally and stepped on it, cracking the microchip case. He had brought home some figuring to do; he could have used the triv but he chose to call on Teddy to use his training cally, calling the sums while Teddy punched them out. They were simple sums – a child’s training cally could only handle arithmetic – and I sat on the lounge-room carpet, turning my head from Dad to Teddy and wondering why Dad needed to ask and why Teddy had to punch keys for easy sums.
At last Dad called, ‘Total one through eight,’ and I, in a fit of showing off, said, ‘Thirty-six,’ before Teddy had a key pressed. Teddy paid no attention and carried on his mechanical addition, but Dad looked at me as though about to say something, then decided against it. I know now that he could do these sums by mental arithmetic (which is terribly slow) but preferred everything checked; he didn’t trust himself always to be right.
It was Teddy who spoke first when he finished keying, and what he said was, ‘You guessed.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Then how did you know?’
I didn’t know how. I muttered, ‘I looked at it.’
He sneered at my obvious attempt to lie my way out of a corner but Dad said, ‘Add three through nine, Francis,’ and I answered at once, ‘Forty-two.’
Dad said, ‘Check it,’ and forty-two it was. I think Teddy would have put me to the torture in that moment; he couldn’t bear what he couldn’t emulate.
Dad asked, ‘And you just look at the answers?’
I nodded while Teddy’s lips formed the silent ‘Bullshit’ he didn’t dare say aloud. Dad did not seem surprised; the gift is not unique and he was well-enough read to have come across mention of it. He gave me some more easy sums. Teddy refused to co-operate and Dad ignored him. At last he said, ‘One through twenty,’ and all my expertise deserted me. I wailed, ‘I can’t see it.’
The trouble was that then I had no mental conception of a number as large as 100 (few people can in fact grasp the totality of more than six or seven objects at a glance) and the proper answer of 210 might have been incomprehensible if I could have seen it. Dad nodded as if he had expected something of the sort and asked if I could do division and multiplication, but I didn’t know what they were.
‘Tomorrow night I’ll show you what they are. Then we’ll see what you can do.’
Mum spoke from across the room. ‘He’s only a little boy, Fred. Don’t push him.’
‘Push? Allie, for him it’s effortless.’
She pursed her lips and refused to argue in front of us but there was argument after we went to bed, with Mum saying obstinately that she ‘didn’t like it.’ Then the door closed and we heard no more.
Mum was the social member of the family, and neighbours were on her mind when she objected to Dad’s teaching me. Teddy was ‘bright’; that was acceptable so long as we didn’t make too much of it, but an aptitude for figures among people who couldn’t add a shopping list without their callies would be seen as freakish, ‘uppity,’ not acceptable. Yet Dad had his way. Mum pretended to take no notice and Teddy ignored the whole thing, so I was able to learn. Weak personalities get their way by being mulish.
Once I had grasped the idea that multiplication and division were only different ways of arranging the shapes they were over and done with. The ‘large number’ problem Dad dealt with by showing them to be as products of smaller, more accessible numbers. Fractions were hard to visualize except for the simpler ones and I sometimes balk still at fractions involving large primes, but decimals were a breeze and led at once to the table of logarithms which, once explained, I worked out for myself.
All this took a few marvellous weeks, with Dad warm and loving in our private world of numbers. Mum’s disapproval moderated when my behaviour did not mutate into anything socially peculiar. Only Teddy blighted my pride. Each night when our light had been put out he would murmur words impossible in our parents’ presence. Just loudly enough to poison my descent into sleep would come his goodnight: ‘Fuckin’ figure farter.’
He was telling me that beside him I was nothing and always would be. I cried but accepted myself as second rate.
Nevertheless I had every kid’s dream of strutting it as the center of attention, and this led to my downfall. In this my sixth year I left playschool for junior school, where we had to attend and learn instead of absorbing social morality by rubbing against each other’s personalities in play situations. We discovered maps and the hugely meaningless size of the world. We were introduced to primers, though most could read after a fashion from deciphering the titles on the triv. We learned the tedious hooks and unions of cursive script, though few adults other than those in specialized occupations used it for more than random note-taking. (It emerged, in an aside, that Swill homes did not have word-processing vox-assemblies and we wondered how they would be able to do anything at all. There were mean legends about the Swill and such snippets fed them.)
Then there was the training calculator, the child’s first simple cally. The first lesson was an explanation of the meaning of addition, followed by a practice session in which our fingers on keys demonstrated that two and two were forever mysteriously four. Vanity overcame the herd instinct to lie low. I announced that I didn’t need the cally and could ‘do numbers faster than you punch the keys.’
The immediate response was scornful giggling from my peers and a demand that I prove my words, and our flustered teacher decided that the boast should be confirmed or exposed. She was probably only basically educated and out of her depth when I justified my bragging. More experienced assistance was needed to accommodate such genius.
For an hour of glory I was shown off to senior staff, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing as fast as the tests were devised. They applauded with tight smiles my innocence could not read. How could I know that these invincible adults, wrapped in wisdom, were all Teddys, hating to be upstaged, or that nobody, literally nobody, learned to figure in his head? When I mentioned logarithms
the exhibition collapsed in grim silence and I was told, in a crash of reality, that I could now return to the classroom and learn the cally like everybody else.
In the playground at lunchtime the other kids paid me the full price for being the one righteous man in a world of vengeful sinners.
Then, at home . . . Teddy, in his senior class, had heard about what he termed my ‘nightclub act,’ and now he rammed humiliation in my teeth with a taunting, ‘Put you back in your box, didn’t they!’ Stung beyond caution, blind with self pity, I rushed at him, to meet a nonchalant straight left that set me howling on my arse in Mum’s vegetable patch.
Mum murmured darkly that nobody listened to her advice and when Dad came home confronted him with the tragic outcome of his meddling. High words were followed by a sentimental session in which I bawled happily in Dad’s arms while he explained that the world was full of people who wanted to drag you down to their level. I learned to hold my silly tongue but was always a fumbler on the cally keys, mis-hitting through sheer lack of interest in the slow machine.
In the next two years little happened in the small world of childhood. Living in a cocooned, cushioned ‘four-room, free standing, smart suburb, 2.5 meter triv,’ we were unaware of having been born into what an old Chinese curse considered ‘interesting times.’
How interesting became evident when Dad was ‘superannuated.’
3
I must reconstruct the background of that year of my ninth birthday, because 2044 was a pivotal year for the Conways. That Australia was in far worse case than could be measured by the fortunes of one obscure family did not impinge; a child has no grasp of impersonal disasters. The stretching of my country on the rack of history did not touch my snug youth.
2033 had been the year in which the pressure of world powers, helpless before the rocketing birth rate, forced us to give away a third of Australia’s empty hectares to those ant-hordes of Asians squeezed from their paddy-fields by swarming fecundity.
Adult Sweet, with their comfortable lives hanging on knife edges of global politics, dared not protest against the coercion by the Great Powers – and so a number of dispossessed landowners, uncompensated by a bankrupt Treasury, vanished into the Swill and were heard of no more. The Swill, who believed that things could only get far worse before they failed once and for all to get better, showed little interest. Few had ever seen countryside, let alone the outback. Desert, drought and flies, wasn’t it? So let the Veets and Chinks and Indons have it. No place for a white man.
Not much of a place for a yellow man, either; two-thirds of Australia has been uninhabitable through millennia, and to that area we admitted him. He set out to make it habitable and in a measure succeeded. He concentrated the weather-control techniques that had been accumulating in cautious experiment for thirty years before and produced a torrential rainfall program, which disrupted planetary weather until international outcry forced moderation. Then he poured megatonnes of soil conditioner and fertilizer into the ground and in a surprisingly short time polluted not only the coastal rivers and the water table but the artesian reservoirs as well. Potable water became as scarce in Australia as in those other parts of the world where expensive iceberg tows and desalination plants brought desperate economies closer to collapse.
By 2044 we accepted shortages as part of life; we were reared on interrupted supplies of water and power and of any food that could not be grown in the backyard. Our parents were inured to minor deprivations and we kids didn’t know there was all that much to protest about.
Reference to a recent past without deprivations did not appear in school histories and rarely in printed sources (in any case, we had got out of the way of consulting printed sources) and certainly not in the sanitized trivcasts. I knew about the population problem, of course; everybody knew about that. But an annual increase of 11 percent doesn’t sound much, even when you work it out as doubling every four decades or so.
How should it when you are nine years old and living the good life?
About Dad: ‘superannuated’ was the word because ‘sacked’ and ‘fired’ had assumed meanings too nearly terminal. The lie that automation would forever continue to create new employment died long before its full effects were felt, but automation proliferated as the only means of maintaining competitiveness; then, with 90 percent of the planet on subsistence, where was the buying public for what competitiveness provided? The computer culture had its back to the wall but the working, salaried minority didn’t dare look at the cracking wall. Who had a job was Sweet!
One day Dad came home early and silent and did not speak to us but went into the kitchen where Mum was preparing tea. And shut the door.
Teddy said, ‘Something’s up,’ and slipped his shoes off. I followed him down the passage. Alone, I would not have dared to eavesdrop but small courage followed a leader. Listening, we learned something about our world.
Dad was explaining to Mum, in a monotone that stumbled and faded and ran into dead ends of speech. He was telling her how progress, magical progress, had squirted him from between its cogs as new techniques erased the human element from creative design. Given a base print and a specification, the new computers sorted millions of alternatives to spit out in minutes the optimum shape of a new component. An entire Department was ‘superannuated’ that day; in the places of eighty men and women, two processor screens brooded over untenanted desks. ‘Superannuation’ had once meant something like a pension. No longer.
Dad didn’t seem able to stop; he went on and on as if for the first time he saw what had existed all his life. He puzzled over the way in which, across the world, thousands of men and women were tossed on to the job market every hour. And that was a buyer’s market. No one looked for a job; infallible Central Data matched fortunate applicant to rare vacancy with disinterested precision. In a shrinking market few fluked two jobs in a lifetime.
The lucky 10 percent – not necessarily the best but those whose capacities matched the requirement of the moment – were Sweet. For life, if their luck held. For the luckless there was the Suss – State Subsistence – the bare means of staying alive . . . in the Swill tenements. No government on Earth could provide better in the day of automated collapse; many could not provide at all.
He said these things until he had emptied his head of them. Through it all Mum did not speak and it was terrible that she found nothing to say. More terrible were the tears in Dad’s voice. I had not known that grown-ups could cry.
There was a worse thing, the expression on Teddy’s face. He had no pity for Dad, only a sneer for weakness.
Mum spoke at last, so quietly that we could make out nothing. We fled when Dad came stumbling out of the kitchen and slammed the bedroom door behind him.
Teddy dared what I would never have done – he went into the kitchen to ask, ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ as if it could be only some small daily affair. She continued preparing our tea with unthinking motions. She might not have heard him.
We went back to the lounge room. Dad’s talk about Swill made no mark on my mind. That was about other people, not us. I studied Teddy’s withdrawn face and wondered why he hated Dad so much.
After a while Mum called steadily, ‘Come to your tea, boys.’ We heard her knock on the bedroom door, and knock again.
Teddy said, ‘He’s sulking.’
Mum must have gone in then, so we tiptoed after her to see what they were doing. They were doing nothing, except that Mum couldn’t stop shuddering at the end of the bed where Dad lay in the red muddle of sheets and blankets and blood from his slashed throat.
Time slowed while I failed to comprehend this new thing – death. I floundered around an empty space in my mind while Teddy crept to Mum and she put out a groping hand to him. Holding it, he leaned over Dad, with that look on his face and screamed like a demon, ‘Rotten coward!’
For the only time in his life, I think, Mum hit him, a wild, swinging blow powered by misery and lost love. He fell down, banging his head
against the wall, and stayed there, blazing with rage. His rage was against her, something I had never dreamed in him, but she seemed to forget him at once and sat looking down at her hands as if there some message might lie. In Teddy’s fury I recognized what must have lurked unformed in my mind, that his love for Mum had been only his need for notice; he loved only Teddy.
When my eyes wandered back to the blood I began to howl. Mum said in a quiet, ordinary voice, ‘Do be quiet, Francis,’ as though I had interrupted a train of thought or compounded a headache. She lifted her eyes to the empty air, to some vision past my guessing. She stared, I suppose, at the future.
In the morning she said little but had put stupor behind her. In the night she must have taken hold and seen what she must do.
She sent us off to school, most likely to get us out of the way and without thinking that the news of catastrophe might be there before us, in the lightspeed way of a community network. Like this: she had notified the Departments of Employment and Finance as the law required; they in turn had notified the Essential Services subsections and somewhere along the line a neighbour had been the Data Supervisor on duty. The news became at once local gossip.
No one at school referred to it openly; Sweet social conventions were based on a refinement of delicacy called ‘decent consideration,’ but kids have their own cruel ways of making meaning plain. What mattered was not the suicide (that was perfectly understandable) but that Dad had lost his job. The implications of this were gossip lollipops – the Conways were on their way down! Blatant avoidance of the subject kept it hot and visible.
Sympathy could not in ‘decent consideration’ be offered. Loss was private. A family should just drop out, vanish. Friends and neighbours should not be made to bear the pain – fear – of failure. Codes of manners made painless the misfortunes of others; we ran gauntlets of barbed silence.
The Sea and Summer Page 4