His voice shook but his talk was beyond me; the Sweet life had fenced off the world he knew. I suppose it was not new to Mum; with her it was that knowing something is not the same as realizing it. I think, too, that Kovacs reached her in a way he had not counted on because she said quite softly, ‘You were telling us about your work,’ as though there could be an understanding that took no note of Sweet and Swill.
It took him by surprise. The muscles of his dark face relaxed in a flash of gentleness. ‘So I was.’ The flash went as fast as it had come and he was performing again. ‘It’s my lecture for the new kids at Swill College.’
Perhaps the flash was not entirely gone; the jokey tone helped him make a new, foreign place of the world, in no way jokey.
‘About coppers – police. The State’s broke. You know that. Most of the world’s broke.’ I had to grow older before I understood the simple and obvious way this had come about but Mum and Teddy seemed to know. ‘How to keep order when you can’t pay coppers? Well, we’ve got a big, useless army, same as everybody else’s got a big, useless army – that’s part of why they’re all broke. So to get some use out of it, some go into training barracks in the Enclaves, where they can stamp hard on trouble and save coppers’ wages. There’s no coppers’ beats in the Enclaves, not one! You with me, lady? There’s only soldiers pretending to train for street-fighting and getting some real good training at it – when the Swill start a riot or a protest or that. But the police, the coppers? Well, law guards property, so the coppers look after people with property – the Sweet. There’s no copper law in the towers, only a soldier’s boot in the guts for the stroppy. But you know all that.’
He was challenging Mum to say that in her Sweet isolation she had not known. I didn’t then grasp the idea of deliberately not knowing something, of keeping it down out of the sight of your mind or of looking at facts in a special light that dimmed out the savagery. Only now, years afterward, can I recognize Billy’s head-on assault as a strategy designed to teach before ignorance could undo us. We could not have understood then that all this, from a filthy and stinking stand-over man, was powered by a kind of love.
‘You know, but it’s never meant anything to you. Rape and theft and murder are part of being Swill. Who cares what they do to each other so long as they don’t get loose among the Sweet?’
I noticed that the Swill were ‘they’ to him. He claimed to be Swill but in his mind he was something else. What else? He was a divided man.
‘You get the picture? No, you don’t, because it’s only half the picture. Swill are dirty and violent and ignorant but they aren’t all rotten. Most aren’t. They don’t like living with louts – your word – who rob and terrorize, but they don’t have a choice, not even your little Fringe of a choice. So there’s us. PR. We keep a sort of order, but we look after them that can’t look after themselves. There’s more helpless, silly people than you’d believe. So PR people have to take risks, up to our lives and our families’ lives. That’s why we take pay. We don’t skin you but we take something and we do look after you, specially the kids. The system works about as good – well – as you’d expect and it’ll cost you ten dollars a head every Monday.’
It didn’t sound much to me but it was a stomach blow to Mum. To pay to live safely in a rundown rat-hole, from a bank balance that must some day vanish. All she said was, ‘Or else you send your thug collectors around.’
He told her with awful gentleness, ‘We stand between you and thugs. If you don’t want us we stay away. After a week of us staying away you won’t have a chair to sit on or a bed to sleep on or a virgin son.’
His bony face had a sad little smile for my open mouth and Teddy’s glare, while Mum opened the purse that had lain within his reach the whole time. He stretched a long arm to take the notes and I saw her flinch from the blunted fingers and nails bitten far back.
He was still talking, explaining. ‘You Fringe people, not Sweet any more and not quite Swill yet, are hard to look after because you don’t know anything and won’t believe when you’re told, and because you live in separate houses, thieves can get at you without noise. So we have to patrol and that’s expensive. A lot of men. A lot of PR.’
He put the money in a pocket inside the waistband of his pants, behind the knife sheath. That meant that he couldn’t count on being safe either.
Mum tried desperately. ‘There must be police in the Fringe. It isn’t – isn’t—’
‘Isn’t Swill? Near enough to. There’s an arrangement. Coppers stay out of the towers except with an escort of soldiers. On their own they’d be murdered. But we tip them off about things they can handle better than us, like if we want a bad mob broken up and put away. Then they come in with troops. That way they get a good image with the State and maybe a quick spot on the news: ‘Dirty Swill fixed but good!’ So they tip us off to little things we need, like your bank figures. They don’t like us, we don’t like them, but it’s a system.’
He uncoiled again to stand down from the crate. ‘I’ll look in later to see how you’re going.’
He waited for Mum to say something but she turned to the window as if freedom might be out there. His face twitched, perhaps with pity. He thought of something more: ‘You kids! Stay away from the towers! If you get into any trouble, you yell for Billy Kovacs. Nobody else, only me. I’m your number two dad, and don’t you forget it.’ He grinned at Mum’s back like a naughty boy. ‘Yours too, lady.’
Mum stayed still as if she hadn’t heard. That didn’t worry him; what wiped the grin off his face was Teddy saying, ‘You’re no father of mine, Ratface.’
Mum cried out, ‘Teddy!’ and came to stand between them, terrified. I was scared, too, but I couldn’t help thinking that ‘Ratface’ was exactly right, for his skull with all its bones centered on the long, pointed nose.
He only looked down at Mum with a wholly different smile to say, ‘Got spirit, that one.’ I felt ignored. He said to Teddy as if no insult had passed, ‘You’d be going on twelve. Been Tested yet?’
Teddy’s decisions to hate were final; he turned his back. Mum said tiredly, ‘He’s twelve. He’s been Tested.’
I hadn’t known and this was big news, because only kids showing Extra promise were Tested. How did he know that Teddy had been listed? He asked, ‘No letter yet?’
‘Not yet.’
He said to Teddy’s back but with no enthusiasm, ‘Good luck, kid.’
It was typical that Teddy’s arrogance should rise above his resentment to try to put Kovacs down. ‘There’s no luck in the Test. You’re Extra or you’re Swill meat.’
Kovacs said then the only thing I ever heard him utter in spite. ‘There’s plenty of Extra heads with Swill hearts.’
Then he went away.
Mum spoke to Teddy with menace born of fear. ‘Don’t you insult him again, ever!’
‘I hate him!’
‘We need him. For a while, at least.’ As if the words scalded her tongue, ‘He is trying to help.’
‘For money! What about when the money runs out?’
She must have thought of that but could only say, ‘We’ll worry then. Be glad of protection while we have it. He is an evil man but we need him.’
Teddy turned on me. ‘Francis doesn’t think he’s evil. Francis likes him.’ Teddy had frightening penetration. ‘He thinks Ratface is a terrific hero.’
He was, as usual, right.
So, in a way, was I. But that is hindsight. Just then I was more disturbed by what had happened to Mum. In half an hour she had grown old.
5
So much had happened, yet it was not quite nine in the morning. Mum shut herself in her still unsettled bedroom; it must have been a horrible time for her, with every fear come true and every inadequacy exposed.
That left us with nothing to do and long hours ahead, and idleness led to the single most frightful experience of my life. With Kovacs’s warnings fresh in my ears, I nudged catastrophe on that first day.
For a while we explored the unlovely house, observing windows nailed shut, lighting fixtures without elements and taps that drooled rusty water in a mean trickle. Our rooms had not been swept out for us, much less cleaned, and the kitchen reflected its owners who to us seemed dirty, decrepit and indefinably wretched. In fact they were simply old, despairing and frightened of life.
A small backyard held a square of patchy lawn and some dusty geraniums. Teddy said, ‘Disgusting!’ and brooded. He was no company. I went back through the house to hang over the front fence. The street was wide, with old, broken traffic-light standards on the corner, so it must have been busy once, but in half an hour only a single commercial hovertruck whoofled past; the road surface would have shaken Dad’s car to pieces. In our old suburb the local council would have poured a new surface; I thought perhaps Newport did not have a council. (It did not.)
Few people were about. Why should they be? It was too early for shoppers and no one with work to go to would live here. Those I saw were neat, like shabby people making the best of what they had; nobody at all came from the direction of the towers. The city might have been dying though the triv news said it was growing like a mad thing.
I slipped out to peep round the corner for a glimpse of the tenement towers only two blocks away, the haunts of fabled brutes and horrors. I would not dare go close but I could go a little way because the houses in the two intervening blocks were Fringe, like our own.
So I went a little way, drawn by the unknown awful, a little way and a little way, meeting nobody – until I stood on the last street corner of safety and the first concrete monster reared over me, a hundred meters away across the road. I gazed, daring no further.
Round the foot of the huge tower was a grey concrete skirt of emptiness, so that the tenement stood in its own hard, empty space. At close hand it held no threat; it was only drab and disappointing. A few ragged people hung around the bare skirt and I heard the clack of wooden clogs; otherwise there was only a closeted hum as if life lurked somewhere, not declaring itself.
Boredom might have sent me home again if I had not heard the noise of kids playing, laughing and calling out, distant but coming closer. Soon I saw them.
They came running, perhaps a dozen of them, all about my own age but ragged and dirty. They wore neither shoes nor clogs; only their voices made sound as they came in a rapid wedge down the middle of the street at the concrete’s edge. It was a chasing game of some sort. The one in the lead ran with arms and legs pumping and the pack squealed at his heels, one bigger boy with long legs closing to tag him.
The quarry screamed when the bigger boy hit him over the head with a clenched fist and tripped him with a kicking foot. It was not a game but a hunt, my introduction to violence in fun.
I stood ice-frozen as the prey vanished in a struggle of kicking bodies, kids crowding each other for the chance to maim. An abominable screaming continued until the biggest one jumped on the victim’s belly, when it stopped.
I expected them to run away then, horrified by what they had done, but they only strolled to the cement skirt, chattering and excited. None of them looked back at the kid squirming on the roadway. Game over. What next?
What next was apparent when the big one noticed me and said – I heard him plainly – ‘Fu’n Sweet!’
My clothes, of course. I wore enough quality on my back to feed the pack of them for a week. He called out something like ‘Wosher nyme, Sweetie?’ in a voice rawer and flatter than any triv actor’s imitation. He jumped the gutter and my petrified throat could barely gulp as the pack swarmed after him with hunting whoops. I expected to die.
My idiocy unfroze and I turned to run.
And ran straight into a hard body and a hand that held me while I shrieked in new and more urgent terror, then turned me around to face my pursuers. I thought I was being delivered to death, but the hunt had halted in mid-street.
Uncertainly the ragged kids looked to their leader while he tried to appear a wise captain calculating the risk, but he was all show. In a gesture that reduced him from fiend to snotty kid he poked out his tongue at the iron giant who held me. Then they all turned back, swaggering, making believe to be neither defeated nor afraid.
Over my head my rescuer snarled, ‘Stoopid li’l bassud! Washer doon ’ere? Yer gonno sennis?’
That is the best I can make of his appalling speech. He had his father’s rat face and bone-and-muscle body but not his rough, hard kindness. He shook me and it hurt, and grunted at me, ‘Onna street in ’em glads!’ and more in his dreadful Swill whine, telling me to wear overalls and go without shoes and to get myself home and stay there. (I found out later that he didn’t always talk like that; Billy had taught him better. ‘Local colour’ he called it.)
At first I could not speak for gratitude; godlike, he had shown his face and the enemy had fled. Then I bawled, with relief and horror, that they had killed the other kid.
‘Ner. Li’l bassud’s awri. Toes dun ’urt. Clogs ’d a dunnim.’ And in fact the battered kid was on hands and knees snivelling and whimpering, crawling and dragging a leg, but alive.
Then the god brought his free hand from behind him and slid his knife into its belt sheath. PR or not, he had taken no chances with the small foe. Here was a lesson: grown-ups could be afraid of children. That kid was lucky to be alive. So was I. The god thumped me, and not gently, in the direction of home and swore his dad would half kill me when he reported how stupid I was, and so laid a new terror over my day.
That was Allan, Billy’s eldest boy, murdered two years later trying to break up a gang rape, when he was just twenty.
At home I said not a word. Teddy would have scarred me with contempt; Mum would have been distraught. I spent an hour dreading the coming of Billy Kovacs and the power of his punishing arm, until Mum appeared and set us to helping her arrange the rooms. After a while I fancied that Kovacs might not come again that day, or even the next, and disaster deferred might shrink to nothing.
He did come, after tea, and I fled to the twilight of the back yard, but he came after me. Instead of taking off his belt and laying into me he ran his fingers through my hair and said, ‘You were lucky, eh?’ And of course I blubbered in shame. ‘Not just lucky, Francis. Allan was there because I told him to be around – because silly kids are more trouble than silly grown-ups,’ With my streaky face buried in his stomach I noticed that something was not as it had been, but conjecture ceased when he commanded, ‘Stop bawling!’
I stopped. Billy had that effect when he wanted to.
‘Don’t go near the towers again! Not ever!’
‘No, Mr Kovacs.’ I meant it. My deepest intention was that I would never go near the Swill or their dwellings. If my social education suffered, my skin would stay whole.
He put his long spider’s arm around me and his breath smelled faintly of the acid-sour chewey. He said a strange thing, ‘You may be special. Not Extra, but – Your mum says you do figures in your head.’
I muttered, ‘Yes, Mr Kovacs,’ luxuriating in forgiveness.
‘Well, we’ll see, maybe.’ I did not ask what we’d see; I was busy with my earlier dim perception. With the brashness that only a child can get away with, I said, ‘You don’t smell bad any more.’
He shook with soundless laughter until he was able to say between splutters, ‘A man doesn’t have to stink all the time. It just helps to show new people what they’ve come to.’
It was not the last example of the lengths he would go to earn his weekly dollars.
I saw now that his hair was groomed and parted, his face bonier than ever in shaven cleanliness and his patched clothes newly pressed.
We never again saw his fully redolent Swill persona though he took to dropping in every day. Mum thawed and learned to trust him but Teddy loathed him. I found him a fine number two dad. How many kids have an accessible hero?
6
Days became a fortnight and Mum did not mention school for us. We pretended glee but in fact were
bored to petty quarrelling, stuck in the house. The fact was that she had no idea where to look. It did not occur to her to ask Billy; his unlikely knowledge of the derivation of ‘shit’ did not qualify him as an educational authority.
There were a few shops in that part of our Fringe district that bordered the Sweet area, away from the towers. In the quiet of the morning we were allowed out to buy a news-sheet in which Mum read, with concealed yearning, of her lost world, which was the only world of news columns. News did not happen to Swill. Billy’s explanation of that was: ‘One bashing’s much like another. No class about Swill murders. Not to disturb nice folk with that stuff.’
There was also a duplicated sheet issued by others who had fallen into the Fringe and now spent their lives complaining about it. It fell stealthily on doorsteps by night, with items like ‘. . . More than 100 unreported Swill murders every week . . . Children starve when their food is stolen by bigger children – or by heartless adults!’
Mum, resisting knowledge, would ask, ‘But is this true?’ and Billy – acting as a sort of schoolmasterly family friend, but still collecting his dollars – would tell her that wasn’t the half of it.
‘But surely it can be stopped. The soldiers—’ She could not understand that the Swill-based garrisons were jailers, not policemen.
Billy would ask with his ferocious grin, ‘How?’ and read her a lesson she refused to accept. ‘Too many people and not enough resources to give everybody a useful share – not anywhere in the world. And the poorer they get the more get born and what can you do about it? Wipe out poverty? How? Easier to wipe out the people.’
Mum ignored the monstrous coda. ‘Equal sharing—’
‘Equal arseholes, lady! There isn’t enough of anything to be equal with. Equal shares would mean everybody in equal poverty – till somebody re-invented business and cornered the food market. It gets worse, not better.’
The Sea and Summer Page 6