The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  ‘Then why must you have your vigilantes?’

  ‘To keep bad from getting out of hand.’ Then he turned his back and would not be coaxed. I lay there feeling ignorant and a mite stupid.

  3

  In the morning he went off as usual with no word of where he would be or what doing but, most unusually for him, with a laconic, ‘I’ll be back about eleven.’

  So he was. Poor Fred would have created drama out of having rearranged his world in order to find time for me but Billy said, as though I should have expected it, ‘Get changed and I’ll take you down to NE4.’

  That was terrifying but I knew that if he had thought it through, it was what would happen.

  I said stupidly, ‘You mean dress?’ For Swilldom?

  ‘The oldest stuff you’ve got. What you put on for dirty jobs.’

  I tried to joke. ‘Those old trousers of Fred’s? With the knees patched?’

  ‘They’ll do.’ He meant it. ‘No makeup, not even powder. Just do your hair properly, like a Swill woman making the best of herself with nothing to help.’ Then, enjoying what he knew would shock me, ‘Don’t wash.’

  My resistance of the night before might never have existed, which meant that it had better not be revived. So I dressed like a dowd in a dead man’s trousers (tightly belted and rolled up two inches), an old jumper and a pair of worn-down shoes, and was sure I had overdone it – Allie the Footpath Floozie with Her Man Who Done Her Wrong – but he nodded Good enough. (Just what a feller requires of his girl.)

  My immaculate suitcases and shopping bags were richly unsuitable; he found me two big, grubby paper sacks like cement bags. I gathered that carrying was woman’s work. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  ‘But what about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You’re dressed. You’re neat and smart while I’m got up like an old clothes pedlar.’

  ‘S’right, but I’m Billy Kovacs. I’m Somebody around here. I’ve got to keep up appearances. You’ll see.’

  ‘While I get around in castoffs!’

  He sighed that great male sigh that has slithered down the ages, the one for the stupidity of women. ‘The hags in NE4 don’t know you. Later on you can slap up a bit but first they have to get used to you. If they pick you for a stuck-up Sweet gone sour they’ll give it to you hard – pick the shit out of a Sweet woman slumming among the Swill. Get me?’

  Uneasily, I got.

  In the street he took my arm and walked on the outside of the footpath (Swill have a standard of manners long forgotten by their betters) and accompanied me with the seriousness of an equerry. I was occupied at first with keeping a straight face, sure that with a Tower Boss for escort no wickedness could touch me.

  There were few people at the Fringe end. I tried not to notice that those we passed knew Billy at least by sight and examined me as closely as they dared without giving offense – to him.

  This street into which I had never set foot ran down-hill from the Fringe, into the heart of the Swill Enclave. There are twenty-four towers in Newport, housing nearly 1 1/4 million people – an average of eight to each three-roomed State flat, a figure that fundamental panic refused to confront as abominable. The nearest was no more than 300 meters distant, soaring like Babel to a height of despair. To reach it we had to navigate a footpath long ago collapsed into rubble.

  Then it seemed that in a dozen paces we crossed an invisible limit of the Fringe and were in the seething gut of a vast, disgraceful city.

  The Swill slept late but once awake they poured from their huddling places into the light. Each tenement tower was a blunt shaft assaulting the sky and around its base, like a dancer’s skirt, spread 100 meters of concrete desert. If those huge spaces had not existed the people would have packed the roadways in an immovable mass. People! I had never seen so much gross humanity at one time. What I had thought of as crowded streets were free passages beside this heaving of bodies. That was a first, loaded vision that gave way slowly to seeing that the crowd moved with purpose and the ease of custom. It lost thereby nothing of its monstrousness.

  Because it stank. Across the width of the roadway it stank of sheer dirtiness and sweat. With a foot on the curb I would have stopped in returning terror of the Swill myth if Billy’s hand had not forced me on. We crossed the broken, traffic-less roadway and stepped on to the huge concrete skirt of the tower.

  I passed into that condition of mental shock wherein the senses operate and the body feels but the will is paralyzed, confronting the bogey of my upbringing, the unimaginable presence of the Swill.

  I saw without immediately understanding that in the packed desert of flesh a sort of territoriality ruled. On the featureless concrete bodies sat or lay, for the most part browned and half-naked to the heat, like figures in a contagious dementia fancying themselves sunbathing on some dream lido. Through and around them others walked tracks that by mysterious consensus remained open; the penned herd seethed with its own impenetrable order. More than that, this mass with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to was not a Slough of half-human Despond, morose and inert. It lived. Its corporate body was vital and its disparate minds were at work.

  As mine was not. I moved in an observing, camera-eyed stupor because Billy forced me.

  NE4 was somewhere beyond the tower, in another street; we had to cross the desert of flesh, through the sickening stink of humanity, of clothes and bodies that smelled of squalor. This mob at the foot of its tower was refuse ejected to pollute the air.

  My one coherent thought was that if one of these ragged dwellers touched me, knocked against me in its passage, I would scream out my panic. It did not happen. Groups divided, stepped aside; contact was avoided. It came to me that we were given passage by people who knew Billy, greeted him at every second step and made way for the Tower Boss and his – whatever they thought me. They did think of me. Every eye raked me. It may have been the scrutiny that brought me around for, quite suddenly, my terror receded to a nervous tension and I was able sensibly to take in what I saw.

  I had braced myself for monsters and there were none here. Dress them, wash and brush them, and who would know Swill from Sweet? Theirs were the faces of men and women, eager or reserved, intelligent or dull, no more, no less. Their opened mouths told another tale, not only by the uncouth dialect of which I caught barely a word but by the brown fangs, broken stumps and sucked-in lips over no teeth at all. But dentistry is free! Horror replied: These are not the dispossessed; they are the abandoned. The man does not come around.

  I was appalled by the irrational number of extremely old people, wrinkled, decrepit and unsteady – surely centenarians to have lived to such physical failure. Then I remembered how the aged Sweet are cared for, maintained by anti-decrepitants and cosmetic medicine; these hordes of aging Swill were not so old, simply beyond the expensive love of the hapless State. They were what I might become in a decade or two. I looked away.

  Among the younger folk there was enormous noise, shouting, a deal of coarse joking, even some restricted horseplay. But there was also music, some singing of songs I had never heard to groups who listened and applauded, accompanied on instruments, most of them flat-toned and home-built but some expensive (stolen?) and played with the natural talent that cries out for tuition. There was a sense, fully alive, of an established culture – I don’t mean of art but of a way of life accepted and understood, defying dirt and the ambience of the gutter.

  Each thing I saw convicted me of ignorance of a whole world I had taken for granted like all my gossip-fed kind, a world quarantined by Sweet fear, State expediency and the gulf of birth and circumstance. But the enclosing smell and Billy’s hand, protecting, reminded me that the eye is not enough. Below the exteriors lay real demons. His changeling self was one of them.

  Beyond the skirt, on the actual roadway, the congestion doubled and redoubled into a moving, dodging mass, too thick for the swift, lithe manners of the skirt. My fear returned in helpless flinching as B
illy held my elbow to drag me through the throng with a forcefulness I would not have dared for myself, too fearful of attack by an infuriated harridan or a simple beating aside by some unseeing male. Then the huge sign of NE4 loomed overhead, most of its lightstrips rotted or peeled away. We passed under it and inside.

  A whole city block . . . cut into corridors by shelves of goods . . . think of a Sweet supermarket ten times enlarged . . . crammed with shoppers as no Sweet venue ever was . . . crammed, overpowering.

  My instinct was to run from the press of sweat and carcasses but Billy’s clutch drew me to one of a dozen queues waiting to enter the shopping area, one person entering as another emerged from a checkpoint. Deafening noise was squeezed by walls and ceiling into a clamour that drowned the rattling of overhead trolleys replenishing the continuously raped shelves. The stench of bodies was insupportable. My imagination faltered at thought of their world of rust-rotted pipes, blocked ducts and the man who never came round.

  I said, ‘I’m going to be sick!’

  ‘You aren’t!’ That was an order, a threat. I took pains to control the retching. I mean pains – anyone who has done it will understand.

  Inching forward, we entered the cave of rationed necessity. My idiotic Sweet apprehension of a struggling mob, feral in determination to snatch items from under each other’s noses, was just that – Sweetly idiotic. The shoppers moved slowly, eyes on the shelves, reaching to grasp and claim while moving with the dreary line. A sort of flaccid accommodation seemed to be the rule, the habit, less deliberate than politeness, less positive than law. Nobody moved against the flow; who forgot or failed to observe an item, forgot or failed. My mind observed in some spasm of note-taking that where anarchy would have been instantly disastrous a pattern of behaviour had evolved.

  So what of the triv dramas and the back-fence rumours of Swill viciousness? Plodding in the endless queue, I recalled fuzzily that jungle law is an accumulation of practical behaviours. Beasts of a dozen species gather at sundown at the waterhole, each in its protective group, without conflict or fear, by day, predators and prey congregate in view of each other until the moment comes for just one to be cut out and killed. There is order, understood. NE4 was the waterhole. Outside . . . best not to assume too easy an understanding.

  Women ahead of me cast over-shoulder glances – I felt myself stripped, pawed, assessed. I might have said something stupidly offensive to their ears if Billy had not turned blank eyes on mine and ever so slightly shaken his head.

  Two women behind me calculated totals and the number of coupon points required for this item or that, and I was shamed that these trudging hags could run rings around me, around most Sweet, in mental arithmetic. In a tribe without callies it was a survival talent.

  I was learning, learning, almost forgetting the purpose – to acquire goods for the home. I tried to watch the shelves and ply my shaky addition and subtraction. At snail-pace we moved up aisle and around corner and down aisle, scanning every shelf. I made an incompetent mess of that day’s foraging, partly through lack of preparation, partly because I did not know what was available (little, and that basic), or where in the endless shelves it might be found. At least the stink became less apparent as the nose surrendered.

  People were openly curious about me, most with a cautious eye on Billy. He relaxed just once to whisper in my ear, ‘The more that remember you the better.’ Remember me as being under protection. The gallant escort did not, however, carry his lady’s parcels. She carried one swiftly filling bag and another slung over her shoulder on a cord. The peacock strutted beside.

  At the checkpoint (magic-eye check, automated gates, no smirch of human hand) the bags were emptied and repacked while I shivered in case my undependable addition had overspent our coupons. My figuring was wrong, though under, not over, but in any case I should have known that Billy was keeping his own score and would not have let me compromise his standing by making a public fool of myself.

  Outside, we fought our way back through the press, I with a heavy bag dragging at my shoulder and another clasped in my arms, he with lordly push and shove to make a way for his packhorse, I would not have believed that a week’s purchases could be so unmanageable.

  In the comparative freedom of the concrete skirt we moved well into the sitting, lying, singing, muttering, playing, self-absorbed mob before Billy staged a grotesque demonstration. (He told me later that he selected a place where some of his friends and thugs were close enough to hear as well as see.) He stopped, turned to me with calculated formality, took the bag from my arms and said loudly, in the Swill jargon I rarely heard from him, ‘U’ll giv y’ and, luv.’ Around us heads swiveled. We moved on at once, he with his arm about my waist, a mutter of comment rustling in our wake. God knows how many scrutinized our progress and noted the breeding points of Billy’s publicly proclaimed mare.

  Take away nightmare and the sweating stops. When we left the towers behind and he asked, ‘Well?’ I was able to pretend a sort of judicious balance. ‘Not what I expected.’

  He was not fooled. ‘Couldn’t be, could it? Afraid?’

  ‘No!’ He was silent. ‘All right, then – sometimes.’ I had been scared witless. To prove the steadiness of my mind I said, ‘I thought I saw a group acting out a story, a sort of street theater. I would have liked to watch.’

  ‘Another time. There’s always something like that. If we’d stopped today they would have gathered. Staring.’

  ‘At me because I was with you?’ Hot news! His grin was offensive. ‘Anyone would think you are an important man.’

  ‘Not just a guttersnipe, eh?’

  ‘That’s not fair. You know I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘No? Well, I am a guttersnipe. It’s just that I’m an important one. To them, that is.’ A frown settled like a mask on his narrow face. ‘You don’t seem to catch on what it means to be a big man in the towers.’

  He made me feel inadequate and unobservant. I tried to joke my way out of it: ‘This is where Francis would ask, “Then why aren’t you rich?” ’

  He said, ‘I am. I’ve got respect and authority and people depending on me and contacts that make me able to look after them. That’s rich, isn’t it? You’re rich, too, but you won’t know it while you think Sweet.’

  He was telling me of a foreign country, forcing change on my view of the world. He said, ‘I’ll come with you twice more. That’ll make it official. After that you’re on your own. Don’t go anywhere except to the store and you’ll be all right.’

  As if I might! I reached home in dismal contemplation of that weekly future.

  At once he was on his way out again. I asked, whining a little, ‘Do you have to go?’

  He gave me the head-shaking half-grin that meant I was not using my brain. ‘How many people live in this street, all of them fingers on their first day into the Swill?’

  My hysteria of the previous night had prompted him to organize a new style of operation. He had fifty men and women fighting through the crush, hour after hour, teaching terrified Fringers not to be afraid. Schemer, thief, liar, informer, lecher, he yet believed in earning the respect paid him and that order and kindness were the responsibility of those who could generate or enforce them. The morality was beyond me. For years I found it hard to credit that men and women existed with an ingrained need to preserve essential humanity no matter what the cost in work and danger.

  The moral cost troubled my schooled beliefs about the sanctity of this attitude or that convention until Billy said, ‘The Sweet wiped you, didn’t they, for getting poor? That was the rule you broke. Where’s the morality in that?’ Another time he said, ‘The only people with morals to spare are the ones who’ve never seen the world straight.’

  ‘The world can’t be wholly wicked.’

  ‘It’s worse, it’s stupid.’

  I suggested, needling, ‘Violence is stupid.’

  ‘It don’t prove anything, that’s for sure, but it’s only stupid when you come o
ff worst. That’s bad planning.’

  You can’t win against a stand-up comic.

  4

  In the third week a few men greeted me as we crossed the skirt. I could scarcely make out the words behind the thick accents. What sounded like, ‘Daichums, Billy,’ was finally identified as ‘Good day to you, Mrs Billy.’ I giggled over the quaintness of ‘Mrs Billy,’ to find that it was not quaint to Billy, who told me stiffly, ‘Mrs Kovacs is someone else.’ He did not often remind me of her existence.

  Inside NE4 a few of the women nodded a distant acceptance. Two or three murmured the ritual greeting and I replied as instructed, ‘Daicher.’ I was not required to know their names unless they offered them; the system assessed strangers gradually. Mores had to be learned.

  In the fourth week I went alone. My heart was in my mouth but might as well have stayed in its proper place; I was not raped or robbed or submitted to indignity. My path had been smoothed with such exactness that soon I acknowledged greetings with something like gaiety.

  In the store I noticed a skinny, narrow-faced boy about sixteen years old who never seemed far from me that day. I had never seen Billy’s sons but I suspected that he had detailed a family apprentice to this minor surveillance. The boy never met my eyes but neither did he let me out of his sight. Once he stopped to speak with a vast jelly of a woman, one of those unfortunates who collapse into middle age with a surge of weight into elephantine arms and thighs. She may have had good looks in her day but they had vanished into greying hair and eyes sunk to glittering from heavy cheeks. She was marginally better dressed than the women about her, less patched, less faded – and clean. So was the boy. She stared ahead as we passed each other, I patrolling up one side of the aisle, she foraging down the other, but I was sure that she saw and summed up every inch of me. If there had been anywhere to run I would have run.

  Late that night Billy said as he played little boy with his pointed nose nuzzling my breast, ‘You saw Vi today.’