The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  Was it so? Really so?

  Billy said, ‘Anyone with half a brain knows the news is cooked – them that still have a triv that works, that is. You Sweet don’t think, because you’re not allowed to. You’ve got to be kept calm to run the State – or think you run it. No upsets for you about people dying when they don’t need to, no desperation about safety and death and food and shelter. No truth because then you’d start thinking and half of you’d drop dead with fright.’

  As usual he had startled me with a possibility and then run it down with overstatement. Conspiracy theory now, that old bogey. I said, ‘Somebody has to know the truth in order to suppress it. It would leak out.’

  ‘It does. Rumours. Say, did you hear about . . . ? Then forgotten because nobody gets all the facts. When it’s only a talk game it doesn’t matter if a bit of truth slips through. Who’ll notice?’

  ‘It couldn’t be done.’

  Quite spitefully he nipped my breast. ‘Hitler did it and Stalin did it and Churchill and Nixon and that was only in one century.’

  Him and his damned bits-and-pieces reading! ‘Perhaps they did but that isn’t to say . . .’

  To say what? Why was the news always good or, at worst, only trivially disturbing?

  ‘It is to say, Allie! Sweet pay taxes and make the State work as properly as the rickety thing knows how and so the State lets them think they’re being looked after. Tell them how bad off everybody else is and they won’t make trouble for their protectors, see? Same with the Swill – make them understand it’s no good rioting for more of anything because there isn’t any more, and anyhow they’re better off than poor bastards in India and Siberia. Trouble everywhere except at home! You can bet the other countries do the same.’

  Quite suddenly he went to sleep and I lay unmoving, finding what he had said as hard to refute as it was to believe. And – this is the proof that he was right in essence if not in detail – my thought as I too drifted off was that it hardly mattered any more; we had made this world and it was all we had. There was nothing to be done about it. Fred would have believed him – he had died of an overdose of truth.

  For an instant I was terrified. Then sleep came.

  As often happened in this pillow talk, a curious thing Billy had said was lost among the words but in the morning it emerged while I brewed tea and made toast with the lumpy bread the State bakeries packed with God knows what to make it ‘stretch.’

  Billy slurped his tea – I never could cure him of that – wearing only underpants while Francis, neatly dressed for school, sipped and silently disapproved. He hated Billy’s morning slovenliness but I was foolish enough, and I suppose enough in love to see this primness as a holier-than-thou phase of adolescence.

  To tell the truth, Billy in the morning is no sight for the sensitive, lounging scruffily half-naked until tea and toast ‘set him up’ and he is ready to shave and dress. His metabolism refuses to deposit more than a minimum of fat and his muscles hang like blobs on a stickman frame. Neat in his clothes, in undress he is like something slapped together from a child’s constructor set. Lank hair droops over a narrow face to meet black shadow of a fast-growing beard, and I imagine I thought as on a thousand other mornings, God knows he’s awful – and I’m a damned lucky woman.

  Still, his frowsy presence over chair and table allowed me to think I saw how the poor lived. We were, of course, better off. We had all we needed . . . and at that the shock words surfaced. I asked, ‘What did you mean last night when you said ‘for them that still have a triv that works’?’

  ‘Did I? That’s what I must have meant.’

  ‘Everybody has a house screen. It’s in the building code, like windows and running water and sewerage.’

  ‘So?’ He scratched his stomach as if that might help and Francis looked delicately away. ‘And then they break down.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘That’s all. No more screen or no running water and a stink in the sh – bathroom. Unless you’ve got a right fixer in your tower.’

  ‘But all you have to do—’ I remembered tales heard in Sweet days but not credited.

  Billy’s big eyes opened wide while he mimicked, ‘All you have to do is ring Triv Complaints and a technician will call as soon as one is available. But he’s never available.’

  ‘I’ve rung and had him within the hour.’

  ‘You were Sweet with a husband paying taxes that bought service. For Swill the man doesn’t come around, the screen stays dark and you do your viewing with the neighbours, until theirs goes dark too. But the man never comes.’

  I said nothing because I would be afraid of a home without a screen. So much depended on the screen and the ancillary terminals, though our present one was not fully equipped. I had often wondered how people coped before triv.

  Francis, young and ghoulish, asked, ‘What about the bathroom? I mean, when the flush won’t work?’

  Useless to protest that this was no subject for the breakfast table; Billy always made sure that Francis got necessary answers, and they talked over me.

  ‘They put up with it till a few more clog up and the stink gets bad. Then Complaints listens and sends a man. And I have to provide a guard for him.’

  ‘They’re afraid of a plague?’

  ‘I don’t know about a plague but they don’t like it when everybody gets the shits and it spreads.’

  I laid down my toast with a lost gentility’s revulsion and even Francis corrected him with his own repulsive pedantry, ‘They contract diarrhea.’

  ‘Do they ever!’ He grinned at me. ‘OK, then, diarrhoea,’ filing the word for use with queasy stomachs. He was proud of his ability to match his spoken English to his company, from Swill to ‘classy,’ but could muddle his styles sadly.

  Francis was not to be put off. ‘Why do they wait so long? And why don’t they fix the trivs? Where we lived before, they always fixed everything. Even here—’

  The fact hit both of us in the middle of the sentence: that we had never had a Complaints serviceman in this house because we had never lodged a complaint. Little things went wrong, but either Billy fixed them with a sort of man-of-the-house enthusiasm or he took the faulty item away and replaced it (best not to ask how) or had it repaired.

  Billy frowned like Francis over homework, meaning that his knowledge was entering an area of uncertainty. ‘We reckon they haven’t got the trained men.’

  ‘They could train thousands in six months.’

  ‘They’d have to pay wages.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What with, Allie, what with? If there was money to pay for what people need there wouldn’t be a Swill. The State’s broke, Allie. I think the whole world’s broke. If I could get at the sort of information the Sweet can get I’d soon know, I’d be able to work it out. Don’t you know?’

  Yes, I knew, but I had never seen the need to assemble the knowledge into a pattern of cause and effect. The planet had been insolvent for a generation or more, what with the repudiation of the Third World’s debts, the awful consequences of the weather changes we called ‘climate creep’ and the bankruptcy of an unemployed mass living on the crumbs of existence . . . I knew but it was a knowledge of the faraway: I did not starve. It would smooth itself out because somewhere out there the world’s economists were twisting theories of money and resources into new shapes and making the circle of credit – that is, taking in each other’s washing – go around and around in a pretence of doing the work of non-existent national reserves.

  This was common Sweet knowledge. The world was planning its way out of bad times; there would be years of hardship, perhaps decades, but also an ending to them. Common knowledge yet Billy did not know it, could not get at the information.

  I knew at last what it meant to be Swill. (So I thought; I was only beginning to know.) These, the greater part of the population, were kept in ignorance, conditioned to live in hell and not ask why. They were not told what might upset them, confuse them, start them
thinking . . .

  Dear God, conspiracy theory now! I’m as bad as Billy. Back to earth, girl, before the rabid paranoia bites you.

  Francis was fitting an unfamiliar phrase into his vocabulary. ‘Would a right fixer be a Swill man who can do a Complaints job?’

  ‘You’ve got it, boy. There’s five in my gang – group. My tower’s the best off in the district.’

  He rarely spoke of his ‘group’ and the mention of technicians altered my hazy idea of its functions, but I still thought ‘gang’ was the truer word.

  Francis asked, ‘Where did they learn?’

  Billy grinned ferociously. ‘They’re Sweet who lost their jobs and dropped into the Swill. All kinds. I’ve got one who can fix trivs, if we get him the parts.’

  He meant steal the parts but he liked to preserve a veneer with us who formed the genteel aspect of his life, God help him. I have often wanted to cry for Billy but I have never laughed at him. It is heartbreaking that anyone should look with envy on our rags of vanished sophistication.

  A few days after this the world exchange system collapsed. All money was withdrawn from circulation. It was a coup of sorts, carried out by the major powers, another throw in the game of keeping the planet feebly moving.

  I was alone in the house when the news broke in a special newscast full of reassurance and an air of taking it in one’s stride, together with details of how the new coupon issue and home-budgeting regulations would make life less complicated. I sat down and wept without knowing precisely why. In a clueless foreboding of the end of all things? After wasting time over that, I set about the daily business of cleaning our rooms, preserving normality in the face of the unknown.

  The old couple, with whom I had finally come to a sort of arm’s length sociability, knocked for admittance and were distraught all over my lounge-room with fears even less choate than mine. Their sole tetherstone was Billy and the hope that my intercession would work for them. Mr Billy, they chattered, would know what to do.

  Mr Billy had no idea what to do, indeed no clear idea of what the death of money meant. He confused it with communism, which Swill doctrine equated with black evil. It took a night of explanation, increasingly woolly as his questions bared my ignorance, to lay that ghost.

  After all the tears and fears nothing devastating happened. The planning had been excellent. We adapted to new methods of getting and accounting and came to think them an improvement. They became habitual. Habits are safe and cozy and we form them quickly.

  The world rolled wearily on down.

  My memory lacks a sense of order. I try to pin down these years and only dredge up incidents dominated by Billy, though in some things he deferred, almost begged. I was his slut and mother, he my satyr and brat in a muddle satisfactory to both.

  That he had a wife and a grown family did not interfere with my contentment; the mind looks where it wishes, not where it should. My taking to alcohol may have been the physical expression of guilt glossed and ignored.

  No, no, I did not take to drink in the grand manner to become a sodden hag, but I looked forward to sharing a bottle of wine with Billy in the evening where once I would have preferred a decent cup of tea. An occasional packet of Ceylon came with the loot from Mrs Parkes but imported tea was not easily got even via her corrupt tentacles; a good class of wine was a more frequent gift.

  We did not drink until Francis had gone to his room at night because he viewed the bottles with suspicion, having a mind full of triv drama showing Swill in drunken stupor. Billy’s insistence that drunkenness was commoner among Sweet than Swill (who could obtain mostly ‘home brew’) did not convince him. We told each other that he was growing up, navigating the difficult years between boy and man; his growing introspection did not warn us that not only was trust dying but love also.

  2

  Mrs Parkes was generous; it would be graceless to say that we went short of anything that mattered. She gave us quality foods, replacements of linen, special clothing and the little things that make the difference between subsistence and some pleasure in living. What she did not give were the basic items of cheap clothing, groceries and so on that could be obtained for the issued coupons. This was good sense but heralded a great change in my habits.

  When money died I went to our post office, a few blocks away, to draw the first issue of the new basic coupons and joined a long queue of faces I recognized but could not name. It was an almost silent queue – Fringers are an asocial lot.

  Most received their booklets with the same deadness of spirit that marked their faces, but there was an occasional outcry laced with fear. A woman cried out, ‘But I can’t shop there!’ and became hysterical and an unexpectedly present policeman ushered her outside. I thought, So even the shops we use are pre-determined, and was irritable until I saw that for proper rationing of quantities the arrangement was inevitable.

  I got my coupon booklet. The cover was stamped NE4, the code for the shop with which I was to deal. I checked the wall map where others also peered to see which dreary shop was indicated. A man I knew by sight turned away and, catching my eye, spoke to me for the first time. ‘No need to look – it’s the same for the whole street. They’ve tipped us in at last.’ I didn’t believe him until I had checked. It was true. It was frightening. Then it was not, because Billy would fix it. My Billy would never allow . . .

  Now the truth about Billy, learned by degrees, as manipulator and fixer.

  His strong-arm hooligans kept a sort of order in his tower area by methods the police could not use without risking civil war and the killing of policemen; in return he was made privy to certain ‘contacts’ and could depend on a blind eye being turned on his errors of judgment. Let me translate: my Billy kept order in his tower by carrying out ruthless vigilante justice. He worked sometimes in covert co-operation with the police and was, in blunt terms, an informer. The informing was confined, more or less, to tipping off the police as to how they might, with the help of the soldiery, manage a large scale round-up that was beyond his resources, but he was not above putting an enemy out of play where his own means failed.

  It says something about the human ability to improve on virtue that this style of tenant vigilantism developed from the very effective Neighbourhood Watch system sponsored by the police in the last century.

  There is no point in pondering Swill morality. Informer has always been a dirty word although there are obviously situations where only informing can prevent atrocities. When I once found the nerve to question Billy’s methods he heard me out, then read me a sermon on survival of the fittest. The end of it stays with me: ‘The fittest isn’t the strongest. If I depended on strength I wouldn’t last a day. Fittest isn’t what you are, it’s what you do with what you are.’

  It meant, unflinchingly, being a thug who was also a police toady and messenger boy. That was what he was; what he did with it was – the best he could for his tower.

  I did not fully appreciate these things when I pointed out the impossibility of my shopping in Newport North-eastern Four and he said sharply, ‘You’ll have to if you want the stuff.’

  We were at the tea table and Francis became urgently tense when I named the distribution center. I said in the flat voice I used when it was necessary to withstand Billy, ‘I can’t go there and I won’t.’

  ‘Then you’ll go without.’

  I tried desperately, ‘Mrs Parkes—’

  ‘You’ll not use Mrs Parkes. Or think of it.’

  In my cowardice I must have looked at Francis because he squalled – the only word for it – ‘I wouldn’t go down there! Not for anything!’ And he poured out a garbled story about children kicking another to death in the street and himself being saved by Billy’s boy, the one who had been killed in some brawl a year or two before. ‘Billy knows about it!’

  Billy did know. ‘The kid wasn’t killed, wasn’t much hurt. You got a fright, that’s all.’

  But I was shocked out of all good sense and ranted at him like a
harridan at his expecting me to venture—

  He stopped me with a yell of anger that must have terrified the old pair in the other half. ‘For fuck’s sake, woman, shut up! Give me a chance to think,’ He added sullenly, ‘You’ve got to learn, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all!’ I mimicked furiously and saw his face and wished I had held my tongue. I thought that surely one of his grown-up sons could do my collecting for me but had no courage to suggest it.

  There was no lovemaking that night. I was frightened, resentful, humiliated and everything unbearable, and he was impatient with what he saw as unreasonableness. He kept explaining, ‘I’m not bloody God. I can’t get the shop location changed. It’s all worked out by Data Central on a map grid that doesn’t know anything about Sweet and Swill. It just knows what shop is nearest to your address.’

  When I bawled, ‘They’re trying to make me Swill!’ I thought he would hit me. Perhaps he should have.

  He said, ‘Swill is when you think you’re Swill. I’ve lived all my life down there and I’m not Swill.’

  When it suited, he would claim to be Swill and proud of it, but he really did think he was a cut above his station.

  Later, when I calmed down, he reasoned with me. You’ve got the wrong idea about the Swill with what your parents taught you and the bloody rubbish on the triv shows.

  ‘Those things happen! Don’t tell me they don’t happen.’

  ‘But not all the time and not everywhere. The Sweet are just as bad behind their closed doors but you don’t see it. In the towers everybody lives on top of each other and you see everything. You see every lousy, stinking thing people do to each other and because it’s under your nose you get to thinking that’s all there is in life. Well, it isn’t. Most Swill people are as decent as you or me.’

  I didn’t dare laugh. He went on, ‘They don’t think the same way as you but that doesn’t make them worse.’