‘He looks after your mother and Francis.’
‘For ten dollars a week each.’
‘He gives value.’
On the edge of tears he asked, ‘How would you know?’
‘It’s my business to know. Everything about the Conways is my business, so I know he looks after them.’
He sulked. ‘Nobody asked him to.’
‘Without him you would all have been mugged, robbed and left in the gutter. He earns his dollars.’
He changed his ground, whining slightly. ‘He hangs around Mum all the time. He’s always there.’
Like that? My information hadn’t included that. It was worth a shot in the dark. ‘You’re afraid he’d kick you out?’
‘No. She wouldn’t let him.’
So there was trust yet. ‘Yes, mothers are like that, forgiving. In any case you should be grateful to Kovacs.’
‘He stinks.’
He meant it literally and it was almost certainly true but it gave me the opportunity to plant a dart. ‘The towers can’t always get enough water. If they wash they may still have to put on sweaty clothes because there isn’t enough water to wash them as well. What Kovacs smells like isn’t what he is. And he’s been good to you.’
‘He’s Swill shit.’
It would have been a pleasure to smack his head, hard. ‘That’s prejudice talking. He could teach you a lot.’
‘Why would I want to know Swill stuff?’
‘As a Police Intelligence Officer you would. Nine-tenths of the State is Swill.’
That was a fact that steadily refused to occupy Sweet minds; not only were the implications too dark but their social training rendered the Swill almost invisible. The idea that there could be Swill Extras would not have occurred to any of them – even Fringers were suspect. To have been told then that ninety-six Swill kids occupied a similar camp in another part of the State would have disorganized their thinking as a contradiction in terms.
Teddy produced his own rationalisation. ‘That doesn’t mean living with them.’
‘Why not?’
He said, ‘It couldn’t,’ because it was not possible, then swept his eyes around the tent like something hunted as he tried to dodge the idea that perhaps it was. He let out a long, hopeless breath and said, ‘I can’t.’
Can’t go home, he meant, because he had made his stand and didn’t know how to back off from it.
I let the matter drop for the night. Slowly, slowly . . . But his climb up adolescent Calvary was not yet done. I asked, ‘Who’s your best friend here?’
He moved his shoulders minimally up and back. I was annoyed by his shrugs and hesitations and evasions and becoming aware of an angry bias in myself. But once started you must make some sort of finish.
‘No best friend?’
He played his game of attacking instead of admitting. ‘Do I have to have favourites?’
‘No. Nor do you have to be generally disliked.’
The damned shrug again. ‘That’s their worry.’
‘Teddy needs only Teddy?’
If he had defied me with Yes I might have hit him and to hell with the consequences, but he said smugly, ‘They don’t approve of Fringers.’
‘Fringers in other squads have established themselves.’
He was not to be put in the wrong. ‘Why do I have to join the mob? Is that what being Extra is for?’
‘Join the mob, no, join the team, yes. PI doesn’t favour lone-wolf supermen fighting crime singlehanded. The turnover in lone-wolf supermen is top high.’
More sulks. ‘They don’t behave like intelligent people. They’re still kids.’
‘So are you. None of you will behave like intelligent people for a year or two yet. Get the idea out of your smart head that you can look down on anybody. You’re a B-Grade Extra, not up there with the pick of the bunch.’
It shook him badly. We rarely told squadmen their gradings because it fostered internal elites, but here the need justified it. It was cruel but not gratuitously cruel. He didn’t know that occasionally we have to throw one back but that we fight hard against sending a good mind to rot in hell. Failed Extras tend to end up as drowsy chewers in the towers.
The blow taxed his capacity to absorb; he had conceived of himself as the most mature mind in his group. (In some not altogether pleasant way he possibly was, depending on your definition of mature.) He was a sorry boy when he asked the obvious, ‘Who are the A Grades?’
Name the competition! ‘I won’t tell you. Just remember that there are better minds than yours quite close to you who choose not to make pigs of themselves over the way they can out-think your tantrums and snide cracks.’
I had to pay his resilience. He asked with real dignity, ‘Can I go now?’
‘May I go now, sir.’
He repeated the words, white and raging. The difference between us lay in my hiding it better.
‘No, you may not. I have more to tell you. A mediocre intelligence can outclass its betters by using itself to its full capacity. You aren’t mediocre, but you have betters. Top minds can fall into traps of sterile intellection while lesser ones search out what they may accomplish. You have talent for language and drama. Think about it. You have also an open sesame to life experience many others have not, and one day you’ll go home and study Billy Kovacs.’
It was too soon to decide what had got through to him but something had, because Teddy Conway was in unlovely twelve-year-old tears, the sniffling tears of a smallish lad with no handkerchief in his pocket who could only stand still and brave it out.
‘Goodnight, Teddy.’
He went without answering and I did not call him back; you can have quite enough of that sort of minuscule showdown. Besides, my part in it had been no copybook operation to pride myself on.
9
Teddy
AD 2044–2045
That night may have marked a turning point of sorts, but how do you tell? At the time I hated his unholy guts for prying at the covers over my mind.
He was right about Mum, but what could I do?
He was right about Kovacs, but I wasn’t able to accept it. That took years.
He was right about me, too, and I knew it, but knowing made no difference. You don’t decide, I will turn myself into a better person, and do it, like a Godstruck church-freak. Change is a life’s work that has to look after itself.
I thought that out, consciously, as I loitered across the paddock back to the tents.
To reach my tent I had to pass the sandpit with the parallel bars and acrobatic gear. In the bright moonlight I could see someone practicing back flips from the bars to the trampoline – very dangerous, a potential back-breaker, forbidden by the gym instructors. It could only be Carol, the bitch who had told me to stuff myself when I offered to help her, all on her intense little own in the moonlight, exercising her pointless talent.
She had tried to make up for that day (short of apologizing, which kids only do under pressure) and annoyed me by always speaking when she passed by. A compulsive friend maker. Her persistence annoyed me and her distorted, long-time Fringe vowels annoyed me.
It was two years, when we were training back in the city, before the penny dropped (what did that old phrase originally mean?) and we became, cautiously, friends. And another six before we married. I get that out of the way now because there’s no room here for the peripheral history of a courtship.
That night it was too late to do more than stare ahead as I skirted the sandpit, and of course she saw me. In the middle of a double somersault she would have seen me. And, being a friendly idiot, she called out, knowing why I would be coming from that direction, ‘You look as if Nicky ripped strips off you.’
As greetings go it was sympathetic but I grunted, ‘Shut your face, shithead,’ and made sure she knew I meant it. I knew she sat perfectly still on the side of the trampoline as she said to my back, ‘You spoiled, spoiled bastard.’
After Nick it was too much. I had to walk the dark in circles
for ten minutes before I could be certain that my face carried no streaks of tears.
Nick must have known what he was doing that night; he never handled me so roughly again.
How it affected me is hard to say. You don’t observe change in yourself; new attitudes always seem to be what you were developing toward anyway. Other people say nothing until the change is made, when they start in with, ‘When I think what a rotten little monster you used to be—’ and you can’t see that you aren’t still basically the you you always were. You are, but have learned to handle the beast better.
I have followed the changes, in some degree, through Nick’s reports. Here is one from my eleventh month:
May 8, 2044
Subject: Conway, Edward Ellison
Classification: Extra, B Grade
Progress summary and comment: 11
General: Great improvement. Recognition of equals and betters has replaced conceit by a determination to excel, often just as objectionable. Still basically a loner but less ready to reject advances. Unable to go home, by his own connivance, he has accepted the necessity to fit himself to social circumstances.
Physical: Continuing improvement, particularly in acrobatics and martial arts. Team attitudes still poor; basic to personality.
Education: Maths much improved; dislikes subject but resents being worsted. Still little interested in sciences. Some talent for mechanical maintenance and repair. Earlier interest in drama taken fresh turn (see Addenda.) Developing interest in modern history; hooked by differences between received and actual truths.
Addenda: Drama coach says boy has become useless in conventional theatrics. Has conceived a style of ‘realistic’ acting involving total absorption in character, out of key with interpretative role-playing demanded by scripts. He claims a script demands only character ‘highlights’ and leaves out everything not shown on stage, whereas real characterization must include what is not shown. He says people in real life hide the reactions scripts force them to reveal, that an actor cannot convey humanity while he is required to ‘portray’ instead of ‘project.’
I have seen him demonstrate his theory. He did ten minutes – from scratch, unscripted – of a schoolboy cheating in an exam, caught and ejected. Solo performance, mime, with a few words when ‘caught.’ It was dull because it was the real thing, not dramatized to underline psychological implications and cunning insights. This could be an ideal undercover talent. Later I will introduce him to true spoken Swill; then we’ll see how good he is, how assimilable into the repellent unknown.
Prognosis: Right for Police Intelligence. Undercover? Must wait and see.
I suppose that from his vantage – overhead and twitching the strings – it was easy to reduce a boy to a set of simple factors and push him in a desired direction.
And if it had been mine? Fruitless speculation, but I would never have become reconciled to him in my heart if I had not recognized, deep down, that we worked to a common and that all his subversion was a prelude to building. Most of my troubles were rooted in bloody-minded resistance to admitting myself less than perfect.
10
Nick
AD 2045
The kids knew that all tutorial classes were recorded for later discussion by the tutors. Born into a data-collection society – which means a surveillance society, however gently disguised – they took it for granted, yet the sessions could be ding-dong affairs with little guard on tongues, much as in family life. Which, when you think about it, is very much a surveillance society.
In the twelve-month camp which the tutors called the Stations of the Cross they tried to gouge out pointers to the kids’ basic thinking. Essays are no good for this – too considered and too given to expected answers. I preferred to set a subject for dissertation, allow a few minutes for thought, then plant the kid in front of the squad to make what impression he or she could. Nerve-racking for some, an exhibitionist opportunity for others.
One topic, ‘How good were the Good Old Days?’ made for Conway a peculiarly private exercise which tutor conference labelled the work of a condescending, histrionic, intellectual little shit. Which was near enough.
There was more to him than that and my private session with him, later, took us a lot further forward. He wasn’t his sassy self that night but met my eyes meekly, with the glimmer of a self-conscious smile, hopefully ingratiating. I had seen it so often on kids waiting for their speeches to be shredded that I nearly failed to see it as out of character – he usually met critical sessions head on and unrepentant.
I said, ‘Drop it.’
He gave me puzzled surprise, instantly repressed, a squirm of discomfort and a ‘student’ voice protesting with prim correctness, ‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘I’ve never hit you, Conway, have I?’
That stopped his acting. The idea was unthinkable. ‘Of course not!’ Shocked, defiant, and no ‘sir.’
‘There might be a first time. What are you playing at?’
He recovered at once, not believing me (not realizing that he should have believed me) and answered brassily that he was ‘exploring.’
‘Exploring what?’
‘How they feel – the rest of the squad.’
‘About me?’ It was blinding cheek but interesting.
‘They’re afraid of you. That is, some of them are. I was being one of them, finding out how it felt.’
‘How does it feel?’
He gave his trademark of a shrug. ‘Uncertain. A short-of-guts feeling.’
‘Are you perhaps confusing short-of-guts with simple good manners?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘And you aren’t afraid of me?’
Expecting a blunt No, I was made to wait while he thought about it. The answer was fascinating. ‘Not of you but of what you could do if you wanted to. That’s what authority is, isn’t it? The power to make people afraid?’
Like most definitions of human activity, it was half right – the wrong half. I prodded. ‘You make it sound like something we should do without.’
‘No.’ At thirteen he had developed a furrow of concentration. ‘Sometimes one person has to give orders and everybody else obey, even if they don’t want to.’
‘If you don’t want to you risk punishment?’
‘That’s what’s wrong. You shouldn’t be punished for disagreeing.’
‘I don’t think that happens too often.’ In this camp, it didn’t, but in much of the disintegrating world, held together by despotic strength, it happened, happened, happened. ‘Punishment is for acting out your disagreement to the point of being a nuisance, perhaps a menace. Is that wrong?’
‘I suppose not – yes, it is wrong. Authority shouldn’t be only a threat of punishment.’
Good lad. ‘What should it be?’
‘Understanding. Correcting. Gentle. Needed.’
I was fairly sure then of his future. ‘One day,’ I told him, ‘I will remind you that you said that.’
Closing the subject while he still wore his surprise, I pressed the start key to set his recorded dissertation on its bullish collision with the subject: ‘Romance is one thing, history another. Romance makes history palatable by making it pretty; real history is dirt and famine and plagues. The legend of the good old days has always been a way to justify disliking something.’ The taped voice had a quality of patronizing certainty at variance with the usual Teddy sullenness. ‘Moving closer to the present we find the same romanticizing urge—’
I cut it off. ‘What the hell did you think you were at? Preparing a political speech? A manifesto?’
Challenged he would always tell the truth. ‘I was addressing a crowded hall – the Historical Society or something like that.’
Role-playing. ‘Why?’
‘It makes it easier.’ He took his time for exact expression. I had learned to wait. ‘It was the theme – only obvious things to say. And you always know just how the squad will react. It needed to come alive.’
/> ‘For them?’
‘For me.’
Now, isn’t that what role-playing is about? ‘So you adopted an authoritarian lecturer persona, with prestige to give weight to your lightest word and some tizzied-up language to match.’
‘That’s about it.’
Now for a touch of cruelty. ‘How does it sound outside the spellbound hall, delivered to just you and me?’
He flushed. ‘Crappy. Pretentious.’
‘Good word. Try putting in a sir now and then.’
‘Yes, sir.’ This still happened at every session.
I set the tape going again.
—as with my father, who lived his life in a rosy past. He owned a motor car, a survival of the personal status era, which he would not give up although its breakdowns wasted our income. His past was paradise and all new things were rotten. If he were alive today he would be crying that the new coupon system would end in the complete collapse of currency – Dad knew better than you think, Teddy-boy. Two years from now, or three or five . . . —and trying to tell us that it was better when you were always calculating how much interest you had to pay and checking your account and working out service charges and worrying about your loan extension and afraid to spend because your financial roof might fall in.
As Dad’s did. He was quoting the State’s propaganda from the triv breaks, the comfort-pap that the coupon system is easier and safer and isn’t waiting to pounce. He was, in fact, calling the population sheep who only wanted their problems offloaded. He was pretty near right.
Yet in his own lifetime the deadly streets were made safe to walk in, data networks made information available worldwide in seconds, the average height increased by 5 centimeters, the lifespan by seventeen years and the IQ average by six points. Listening to him made it plain that the good old days were just nostalgia in the minds of discontented people who didn’t remember properly.
I stopped the tape. ‘Well?’
He was judicious about handing down an opinion. ‘The English expression is good.’ For his age, yes. ‘It sounds a bit high-flown, I think.’ In fact it sounded contemptuous and unforgiving, as if someone ought to suffer for it. He concluded, ‘But the idea is right.’
The Sea and Summer Page 15