My calculations changed from cash to kind, frustratingly complex when values were assessed in terms of consumer demand instead of ability to pay. Knowing what a thing was worth required more art than knowledge; the continued use of money terms, still the easiest way of expressing comparisons, was an exercise in abstractions.
Absurd State errors occurred, usually through faulty programming. Billy told horror stories, mostly secondhand, of Swill communities starving through computer error when Deliveries provided tonnes of salt instead of reduced protein, or some such stupidity, but the newscasts reported only the odd comic mixup that had no serious consequences.
There were thin times for some while the system ironed out its creases. In an older day such occasions might have been marked by mass protests and blood in the gutters, but nobody now believed in a better future – better to face life at subsistence level than die by useless violence. That may be a conclusion of hindsight, but at fifteen I saw pragmatism as the common-sense way of solving social problems. I still do.
Total State control made little difference to Mum and myself. Both of us were rediscovering our personal lives and this is always what matters most to any of us. We were growing apart. It’s all very well to talk about natural affection and love and the rest of it, but behaviour comes down ultimately to conditioning and advantage. Once you recognize the selfishness motive you begin to see things as they are; what we do ‘for others’ we do because it suits us, because we get pleasure or because we are constrained. In the end it’s all personal profit and loss. Love (using the romantic term for it) can make you forget everything you ever learned about human beings – and later on you pick yourself off a rubbish dump of misery, then look back and see how you let yourself in for it by forgetting that love, for lover and beloved, is total selfishness, the ultimate I want.
I had a few schoolyard crushes, but little good they did me; morality was in one of its cycles of prim virtue among the Sweet. Some Fringe girls were less restricted, or perhaps more fed up with the greyness of Fringe living, and between us we learned the tearful rules of the game. I have forgotten most of their names and would be surprised if they remembered mine.
Mum and Billy stopped pretending. When he moved in permanently I wondered what was the position of his wife and family in the tower. Did he give them his spare time as he once did us? He was a contradiction, a sentimental man without moral standards, and that’s an optimum combination for free-lancing sexuality.
I had outgrown hero worship and become immune to him; he was good company in his half-wise way but limited in his outlook. His disordered reading was only a picking at bits; his mentality and world view were pure Swill. How Mum put up with him I don’t know; pleasure in bed doesn’t explain it. I couldn’t ask about it; what they shared with each other was taken away from me.
Billy began taking part of his Parkes rake-off in high-class wines and spirits, and he and Mum drank together of a night. They didn’t get drunk – Billy would never risk that – but it was part of their loving, something more I could not share. I didn’t want to share it. I was seeing them without illusion and soon with less affection. I understood how Teddy could go off and never come back. I saw Mum as she really was, a good-hearted woman, courageous in her way but finally weak. How else could she have accepted Billy?
Beyond the PR gloss he was just a criminal. He stole when he could and was involved in ‘removals’ of people he called ‘bad types,’ who may have been no more than competitors to be got rid of. I can’t say I ever really disliked him; we were better off with him than without, but his sentimental efforts to ‘be a father’ to me were embarrassing.
I was growing up while Mum was growing down, making herself Swill when she took a Swill man. This was proved to me the day Mrs Kovacs came howling about her rights.
She was grey-haired, fat, ugly, and vicious as the hungry gutter cats. Billy couldn’t be blamed for preferring Mum.
I opened the front door to the knock and there she was, meaty-armed and monstrous in dirty overalls and sandshoes, with evil, angry eyes. She said nothing, just pushed me out of her way and almost walked over me – she must have weighed 100 kilos – and into the lounge-room where she screamed at Mum in a Swill argot we could scarcely follow, working herself up for violence. It was sheer luck that someone had warned Billy, so that he came in only half a minute behind her. She wasn’t afraid of him and made it plain at the pitch of hoarse lungs; he had practically to fight her out into the street, and she left bruises on his face.
After that I simply had to cut free. If I stayed in that house I would fall to their level by sheer pressure of environment. They were dangerous to me.
Another influence tipped my feeling, a comparatively small thing.
I woke one morning during the ‘winter’ months feeling cold. The power had failed, which was nothing unusual; it could fail at the hint of an overload, or without it. There was talk of new power plants but they were always being built, never in operation. No money! So we suffered at the dip of a thermometer. Mrs Parkes had a heat pond out back . . .
My bladder got me out of bed, to find the lavatory blocked and stinking. (A job for Billy – he didn’t care what he tackled.) It would have to be the back lawn. Shivering in slippers and dressing-gown I stepped into the backyard and into something new and strange. The ground, the plants, the grass were filmed over with frost, like the food in the freezer compartment of the fridge.
Outdoor frost I had heard of but never seen. It was beautiful in a way but frightening; there was satisfaction in dissolving it away in a warm stream but none in the cold air nipping at nose and fingers.
The house was cold and Mum was making breakfast on a smelly oil stove, a bit of junk Billy had found somewhere, and I put my fingers near to warm them. Mum said, ‘There was always frost in winter once,’ as though it had been a pleasure; she had taken to remembering ‘old days’ when everything was somehow better though it sounded worse.
Billy came in, in shirt sleeves, looking as if cold did not bother him, and I said, ‘I thought it was getting hotter all the time.’
‘So it is. World average is up 4 1/2 degrees since 1990.’ It was the sort of trivial exactness he picked up from his reading, like a bird pecking at the pavement. ‘That’s the Greenhouse Effect,’ he said, as if nobody had called it that before.
Mum began, ‘I remember—’ and cut it off as she heard the words coming too easily, too often. ‘There used to be argument about that. Some said temperatures couldn’t rise more than 2 degrees because then the air would be saturated. Others said it could go as high as 14 degrees and melt the southern ice cap.’
‘The ice cap is starting to melt. That water in the bottom of the street isn’t all flood water.’
I objected that it would take more than a piddling 4 degrees to melt the polar cap and he said that it was 10 degrees higher there. He couldn’t explain why; there was always a hole in his reading that stopped him from knowing anything useful. Anyway, the met stations said the oceans had risen 30 centimeters overall.
It was my turn to start, ‘I remember—’ and not continue. I remembered millions of Swill swimming like mad, and stopped at the thought that most of the Big Sweet lived on high ground well above the coastline and the river. Did they know facts that we did not, facts not discussed on newscasts or in triv plays?
And there was this morning’s cold. If the temperature was rising, how . . . ? Billy had the answer among his jackdaw bits. A volcano had blown its crater 5,000 kilometers away and filled the air with dust, so there would be some temporary cooling.
At school the heating was off but came on at midday when it no longer mattered. At Mrs Parkes’ house it would have been on all the time . . .
I thought how it hurt to go into her house and see not just beautiful things but clean things, new things, unbroken things. What we had at home was cramped space, blocked sewers and the tattiness of neighbours and neighbourhood. And now the sea moving up the street. I could perc
h on the fence and see it in the distance, reaching up at the tenements before it ebbed back into the bay. Closer, closer, and one day not to ebb at all?
It was time to get away from the dirty, dangerous Fringe.
5
Nola Parkes
AD 2050
Francis at fifteen was little improvement over Francis at nine or twelve. I did not glean much from conversation with Kovacs but could see that the boy had outgrown his young love for the man; tiny touches of resentment, unconscious facets of attitude, peeped out. I suspected, too, that affection for his mother had waned, that he loved little beyond himself and my hoarded books. I had to remind myself that his home life must be deadening, his social life arid, confused and driven by Swill fear.
He rarely displayed much wisdom but could move effectively when crowded; he always managed to slip from between contending issues. So I suspected that circumstances were forcing him when he made his natural, logical and, I was sure, dishonest request.
He lingered, one Friday night, at the end of our accounting session instead of making impatient getaway to my library shelves.
‘Is there something you want, Francis?’
He had become a good-looking boy who would be handsome and poker-faced. He was capable of a charming smile, but rationed it. He offered me the beginning of it now, the twitch of a smile in process of becoming. Very appealing. Wasted on me because I was unable to like him. He was with me still because his talent and his silence, of which he knew the value to both of us, had become indispensable.
‘There is something, ma’am. If I could – It’s just that—’
His teenage acting was unpolished, the hesitation too calculated to display the poor young man who knows his place but trusts in the stern but just older woman. He had only bad triv scripts to learn from. Hesitation should be followed by a rush of words. It was.
‘I was thinking, ma’am, that I could be more use to you if I was on your proper staff. If I lived in Quarters. You could call me when it suited instead of having to save everything up for Friday.’
The idea had at times presented itself to me. It would enable me to pay some debts of obligation by farming out his talent in small, regulated benefices – bribes and thank-yous. I had mentioned the farming-out idea to Kovacs, who had been nervous of Sweet areas outside his knowledge, game enough but afraid for the boy if a move misfired.
‘Have you talked to Mr Kovacs about this?’
The question took his planned dialogue unprepared; his mouth opened and closed. At length he shook his head, sensible enough to be truthful where he knew I could nail a lie.
‘Why do you want to leave home?’
He answered instantly, ‘Because I hate it,’ dropped his eyes and his voice in decent reluctance to complain of personal matters. ‘Mum’s got Billy now. All the time. Like a husband, I mean. They don’t want me around.’
I knew that Kovacs had moved into the house and he had been cheerfully open about it when I referred to it as a reminder that I kept my eye on him. Being curious about Mrs Kovacs, I was told bluntly, ‘I look after her and the kids, I love ’em all. But for bed games you can’t go on pretending after twenty-five years. You have to be honest.’ Honest! Billy Lecher had charm and was as common as dirt. I could have told the presumably contented Mrs Conway that he sowed his seed lavishly in the course of his PR activities and was known around the gutter as Billygoat. He had the morality of a teenager mixed with a genuine capacity for love (in his fashion) and respect for his responsibilities. Certainly his zest for living cut across the Swill legends of misery and resignation.
But who knows the hearts of the tower dwellers? We don’t want to know. I understood Francis’ need because, like anyone on the secret knife edge, I shared his fear of the depths.
I said with some dryness, ‘You don’t look neglected, Francis.’
‘Oh, I get enough to eat and that – it’s just that they don’t care any more what I’m doing. They don’t even ask.’ Silly! He should have guessed that Kovacs asked, often. Came the predictable punch line: ‘They wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there.’
He deserved sending off with a flea in his ear, not for his ingratitude, because fewer children are grateful than their parents hope, but for the blatant attempt to use me. Still, there could be advantages . . . Automatically, in line with the mental processes of years, I looked for compromise and found it.
‘You can join Staff as a trainee warehouse auditor.’ Placement Data would complain but could be overruled. The boy’s face was a study to treasure; it had not occurred to him that a move to Quarters necessitated the creation of a real job. ‘There will be time for you to continue your special work. And to go to school.’ I had expected school to cool his fever but his face approved the word.
‘You want to study?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘For what?’
‘To go to university, ma’am.’
He had surprised me. ‘It can be arranged, in time. But to what end, which degree?’
He shook his head, not knowing, saying a little desperately, ‘There must be something.’
‘Something essential?’
He nodded fearfully, knowing that I saw clear through him.
‘Something so necessary that it will save you forever from falling into the Swill?’
That was cruel, for it was a perfectly good motive. But reason enough for lies and ingratitude?
I allowed myself an unjust mockery. ‘On present trends the whole planet will be Swill soon enough.’ Plainly he did not recognize the possibility, was impervious to the world outside himself. I moved to remind him of it. ‘You can move into Quarters next week, but—’ How his head came up, wary of conditions! ‘—but I will not have you desert your mother and Mr Kovacs. You will spend your weekends at home.’
It was obviously a setback but he knew better than to protest or comment. He was sufficiently upset, when I sent him away, to forget to take a book.
I regretted my need of him. The young brute had not spoken a word about the future for his mother and Kovacs, probably had not thought of them, but I meant to see to it that he found his responsibilities pursuing him up the ladder of escape. Deductions from his vouchers would augment the Kovacs contribution I had no intention of stopping. Francis must pay for his self-seeking.
We all pay for our self-seeking.
6
Francis
AD 2050
I had expected refusal, to have to make the attempt again and again until I succeeded; even the qualified success was a triumph. Mrs Parkes recognized my value to her, the rest was just conventional family-style thinking. And her kindness was remote, more like good manners than goodwill; her true thought was hidden.
When I got home Billy was out somewhere, which suited me. He was hard to lie to. He would not try to trip me up but simply look and walk off, leaving me soiled and ashamed even when I was in the right.
I told Mum that Mrs Parkes had decided to put me on Staff, that it meant promotion and bigger rewards – and that I would have to live in Quarters.
Her face went quite still. With scarcely moving lips she said, ‘So both my sons are successes.’ The oblique reproach upset me so much that I blurted out what I had meant to keep to myself until I had thought about it, that the Ma’am wanted me to spend my weekends at home.
She relaxed like someone who had started at a shadow.
She had lost much of her figure and complexion of her Sweet days though she looked better than some of the Little Sweet frumps in the Ma’am’s big office at City Center; she was filling out and would get chubby, her skin was roughening and would become lined. Still, she was not soft and helpless and she had Billy. She smiled now after the ugly stillness and said, ‘You must make your way, but don’t leave home.’
‘But some day, when I grow up—’
‘Time enough then. But not yet, Francis. Not yet.’
Her gentleness rocked my determination; in that moment the future
could have resolved itself differently. Yet I knew that I must be resolute or be lost. I kissed her and went to bed, leaving her to tell Billy.
I expected hard questions from Billy when he came to breakfast in the morning, half-dressed as always with only a spit of a wash. I had grown used to his slovenliness but now I saw it again as repellent and gutter cheap. He might drag Mum down but not me.
All he said was, ‘You got a lift-up, eh?’
‘Yes. It means more work though.’
‘But good pickings in Quarters.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
At the stove, pouring tea, he said, ‘It’s what you wanted.’
‘In a way.’ I did not recall ever saying what I wanted but Billy’s intuition could be troubling.
If he was probing, Mum stopped it by saying, ‘If he’s to have two homes he’ll need more clothes.’
He sucked his tea with the slight slurp he never conquered. ‘That’s the Ma’am’s worry. She wants him, she sets him up.’ He stared hard at me. ‘Right?’
I hadn’t thought of it. ‘I suppose so.’
‘If you sell yourself, see you get a proper price.’
Sell yourself was sour; I had the feeling of being tested without knowing what for, but comforted myself that it was just Billy’s habit of distrusting every move until he understood it thoroughly.
On the Monday morning when I left to start my first week in Quarters he said, ‘We’ll see you Friday night, then,’ and my guilt suspected irony.
It did not occur to me that Billy, whose only business with the Ma’am was picking up the weekly fee, rarely seeing her, did occasionally talk with her as part of what he fancied to be his responsibility as number two dad. Had I known I would not have dared to carry out my plan. I always feared Billy even when I loved him.
A senior house clerk saw me to my room in Quarters, a compact combination of bedroom and lounge-room (what old novels called a ‘bedsitter’) with a full-sized triv and a full range of terminals and accessories, a small refrigerator and utensils for preparing snacks and drinks – luxury for the body, privacy for the mind.
The Sea and Summer Page 10