We went rapidly down Bourke Street. I wanted now to get back to barracks, away from the footpaths where black lanes and alleyways dived between buildings into the silent blocks. Almost silent. Voices twittered in their darkness.
‘Swill,’ Arry said.
I remembered the schoolyard furphies about sewer gangs. ‘What are they doing?’
‘Scavenging.’
‘Don’t the coppers—?’
‘No law stops Swill coming to Center or anywhere, but turn up here in bare feet with the arse out of your pants and you’ll get rushed out fast, loitering or something. Night’s different. Give and take. The coppers look away.’
‘Muggers!’
He laughed at me. ‘In Center? You Sweet get ideas! The Bosses wouldn’t stand for it – they’d have to be squaring the coppers all the time and maybe throwing them the muggers to keep them quiet. It’s for scavenge.’
The accumulating picture of Swilldom as a ramshackle culture with a hierarchy and rules and a sort of grimly enforced order began to work into my imagination.
Arry grabbed my arm. ‘Watch!’
All that moved in the street was a line of cleaning robots, a dozen of them, single-filing uphill toward us, deploying I thought, for a fresh sweep. ‘Watch what?
‘The cleaners.’
The leading robot mounted the footpath at the mouth of a laneway, opened its hatch and tipped out the whole of its gathered garbage in a pile of assorted detritus from offices and cafés and gutters, then rolled back a pace and paused as if waiting for an activity to follow.
Scavengers erupted from the laneway and burrowed into the rubbish. Across the road from them and fifty meters away, we could not see too well in the poor light but it was plain that they knew what they wanted and worked to a method. In minutes the heap was reduced by a third and the extracted material passed by a chain of hands into the darkness. A half-naked figure operated a control on the frame of the robot; it rolled forward, sucked up what rubbish was left and moved off to the discharge depot it had been headed for. Another took its place.
‘What are they taking?’
‘What’s useful. Bottles, cans, bits of metal, pins and clips and rags but mostly paper.’
‘Paper? It would be all written on or screwed up.’
‘Written on one side – the women iron it out for writing on the fair side. The rest, wrappings and stuff, gets pulped and mashed and pressed for the shapers. You can make a lot from paper, even some kinds of furniture.’
How long would a paper cupboard last? Did it matter, while you could swipe the makings of a new one?
Arry said, ‘Kitchen cleaners have food in them, scraps and half-eaten stuff. It gets boiled up and mixed into messes.’
Revolting messes. But the State ration was calculated . . . Back in the Fringe Kovacs had said Swill stole from Swill, strong from weak, even adults from children . . . There would always be someone in need of food, starving amid plenty – the most ruthless Boss could not prevent it. I suffered a heaving shame at never having known hunger . . . at having known all my life of the underside of the world with no feeling for it but revulsion . . . and at now failing to understand the mind of Arry who knew and for the most part contained his rage.
Across the road the cleaners’ contents were sorted with the orderliness of a State operation. Interference with State property . . . my mind was still on law. ‘Don’t the coppers ever stop them?’
‘You don’t catch on, do you? The coppers program the cleaners to stop at scavenge points when they’re full.’
In my head the structure of society shifted again.
Arry’s thin face was picaroonish in the half light. ‘If we can use what Sweet throw out, why not? The coppers are bastards but they aren’t stupid. And in the towers a thing has to be properly busted before it’s useless.’
Two men left the working party and crossed the road a little downhill from us. In the shadow of the veranda they almost disappeared.
I said, ‘They’ve seen us.’
‘They saw us when we got here. So what?’
‘They’re moving up on us in the shadows.’
‘There’s only shadows to move in – they’re not sneaking.’
Nor were they: they walked openly and quickly.
‘What would they want?’
Shrug. ‘They’ll tell us.’
They halted a few meters away. One, in the lead, was shortish and muscular but I could not see much of his face; he was heavily bearded. (Shaving, when you stop to think about it, is an expensive luxury.)
He said softly, ‘Arry?’
My bleak reaction was that Swill Arry had thrown me to his Swill wolves. I accepted betrayal as an instant, unarguable fact, with no more reason than that class distrust dies hard. I stiffened in the rictus of panic. I was green and empty of experience, all intellect and no resource. Later I would learn to deal with tight corners, to take instant mental stock or explode into action as the case required, but that night I was useless. Like a hypnotized rabbit I stood there while Swill talk flew faster than I could catch. Until Arry said, ‘Don’t you recognize him, Teddy? Nick Nikopoulos.’
Youth is stupidly resilient. An older man, myself today for instance, with practical knowledge of violence and evil might have crumpled from sheer relief at the lifting of a threat, I, fifteen and infinitely elastic in ignorance and fast recovery, only poked my head forward to squint and say, ‘I didn’t know you under the beard.’
He came with his hand out and I caught the Swill stink of him, brute sweat and drains. A perfect impersonation. He wrung my hand like a blood brother and said, ‘It’s time I had a look at you.’
Like an idiot I could only say, ‘What for?’
Some grimace behind the beard was perhaps a smile. ‘To see if you are growing up yet.’
The second Swill stayed perfectly still, out of earshot but in easy reach. Back-up? Bodyguard? Something like that.
I said I thought I was doing well enough.
‘But you haven’t been home yet.’ It was a statement, not a question, sprung with unfair suddenness.
I tested it. ‘How is my mother?’
‘Well. She sends her love.’
It was as indecent as a punch below the belt that he should have sought her out and that her forgiveness should stalk me so far. I blurted out hurt pride and guilt: ‘I haven’t asked for love.’
‘I don’t imagine you have but she doesn’t let desertion stand in the way of it.’
I snarled, ‘Kovacs stands in it.’
‘Would you expect him to leave her to fend for herself? He loves her.’
That improved nothing. ‘He’s got a Swill wife.’
‘And plenty of others. His proper name is Istvan – Stephen. The other is for Billygoat.’ To my plain distress he said gently, ‘Swill life is what it is, lad, not what you’d have it be. Arry, haven’t you taught him anything?’
Arry said, ‘Not much chance yet.’
‘Dig Arry for all the Swill information you can get. Learn the words, practice the accent until you can think in it.’
It was a menacing instruction. ‘You’re not in charge of me.’
‘When you’re ready, I will be.’
‘Arranged, is it? Who says so?’
He rode over the sneer. ‘It’s arranged.’
‘In spite of—?’
‘In spite of my losing my cool with you and being taken out of secondment. You’re mine, Teddy. I picked you and a couple more and I mean to have all of you.’
I said, ‘You think that’s a compliment, you bastard.’
‘It is.’
‘I’m not spending my life scrabbling among Swill.’
‘Not your whole life – that would be waste.’
‘Not even some of it. I’m not proud any more of being Extra but I’m not going to work the towers.’
‘Not even to sieve and sift the poor buggers who’ll never stand a chance unless somebody with sympathy winkles them out and get
s them on to the Testing lists? We need people who can sink into the part and be Swill without ever forgetting they’re Sweet. That’s you, Teddy.’
‘Stroking my vanity?’
He laughed. ‘Indeed, indeed. How’s my touch?’
More than touch he had knowledge, enough of it to know that my attitude in the camp had cloaked trust and the need for his cool interest. I had rejected my father, reacted with contempt against Kovacs and given him, Nick, only the resentful service of the coerced, all the time silently yelling for a parent to shake sense and affection into me. He knew these things because it was his business to turn kids inside out and know them, while I saw cloudily that I wanted to work with him and have him proud of me – but on my terms not his.
I said, ‘Let Arry do your sifting. He knows his own.’
Arry muttered, ‘I didn’t come out just to go back.’
‘Arry is promised to other work – physicists don’t come in coupon rolls.’
‘Meaning I’ve no choice?’
‘You can always transfer out of my reach. Into the Clerical Branch, say, and be a key puncher.’
That was blackmail of a sort, the appeal disguised as a sneer. The appeal was strong enough for me to grunt that I’d worry about that when the time came, not committing myself.
He asked, ‘Are you ready to go home to Newport yet?’
‘No.’
‘As you like. I’ll keep in touch. ’Night, Arry.’
Without fuss he left us, his shadow after him.
I needed a quarrel. ‘You arranged this, Arry!’
He was unrepentant. ‘Nick fixed it – I only had to look out for him. We’d better get back to barracks.’
I pushed it. ‘What are you, the squad’s official sneak? Do you report on me to Nick? Or anyone else?’
He sighed. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid. He just wanted to see you. Don’t take him cheap, Teddy, he’s a great bloke.’
‘Shit on that! Who’s his mate? Another copper playing games?’
‘Maybe, Or maybe one of his tower family.’ He said, watching the effect, ‘Nick’s old man is my Tower Boss.’
It stopped me like a slap in the face. Yet it made sense of a kind while it left me with the bizarre, chastening knowledge that of the three people closest to me in my chosen life Carol was a Fringer and the other two were Swill. A psychologist might have commented that I had chosen as my instincts drove me. Anger melted as my mind revolved Swill paradoxes. ‘They must know Nick’s a copper.’
‘The Swill? Some of them know.’
‘We were always told they couldn’t go into the towers.’
‘Like we were told that coppers captured Swill kids and gangraped them.’
‘We had it that the Swill abducted young girls.’
He nodded wisely, my tame sociologist. ‘There could be truth somewhere – things that happened and got built on.’
‘So police can go into the towers?’
‘Not quite. The right ones can go in but no uniformed man would risk it. On his own he wouldn’t get out again.’
It seemed that nothing was black or white. ‘Some can, some can’t. There’s anarchy, there’s order. There’s plenty, there’s starvation. It can’t work like that.’
‘Can. Does. Nick’s old man says it’s history sorting itself out to start again.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Fertilizer,’ Arry agreed, ‘and are we all in it!’
A smug bastard at times. At last I had to ask the basic question: ‘So what is Nick doing back there?’
‘You don’t think he’d tell me, do you? Who says he’s working? He could be visiting his old man. Or maybe it’s just—’ he searched for a phrase from his reading and got it wrong, ‘—memory of the muck.’
Rain fell before we reached the Telltale. We got soaked and spent most of Saturday cleaning the ‘borrowed’ clothes.
I felt obscurely in need of more punishment than that. I had begun to see ignorance as a crime.
14
Nick
AD 2050
At seventy-one my old man thought he still ran his tower in Richmond. In fact my brothers and their grown kids did the tower’s rough and tumble work and my eldest sister, who had failed her Test by a fraction, was the planner; the old man took such kudos as there was and loved himself no end. He never forgave my being a copper, refused to speak to me when I visited, but once a year signed that his paternal heart bled still for a stubborn son – he sent me a Christmas card.
In some sentimental long ago he had somehow acquired several hundred of them and each year distributed a few as tokens of favour. They were traditionally stupid, with red-coated Santa Clauses ho-hoing over the arses of grinning reindeer as they whiffled through midnight blue skies over landscapes of snow, with some verses on the inside flap by a dewy-eyed illiterate. These, for an Australian Christmas with the air like steamed pudding at 42 degrees or better!
The thought, as they say, was a kindly one and the card for 2050 had more than the usual stark Nick, from Your Father on it. There was a message, the first in nearly twenty years, in his inexpert script: You never come to see me. This was untrue – I went two or three times a year to stand around while he pretended not to see me. But I knew what he meant – I was up for official forgiveness.
I left the card on my desk while I went to see what the Colonel (Operations) wanted of me.
What he wanted was my services over the Christmas holiday period because of a confluence of weather forecasts which made Christmas Day tactically favourable, in his estimation, for a Swill raid. I might have wriggled, even argued, if the job had not been in Newport on request (through illicit channels) from Tower Twenty-three – the Billygoat.
I laid Dad’s card in the drawer with all his others, thinking that I would have to find a way of explaining that duty really did come before even the most royal forgiveness, when I was struck by an idea – concerning forgiveness – that at first only tickled my fancy, then on consideration seemed promising. It could further an aim deferred too long, it might set me in the good books of a Tower Boss whose goodwill was no mean asset, and it might be the making of a bright but directionless young PI officer.
That flash of an idea had far-reaching consequences.
Now – about corruption and Nola Parkes:
The coupon system was cumbersome but necessary. Computer rationing would have been simpler, but to have thrown the Swill to the mercy of Molecular Storage Accounting – which would have told them when and how they could have what, with no leeway for individual preference – might have been incitement to more violence than could have been controlled without slaughter. The mob was always simmering; the harassed State knew better than to remove all self-determination.
It had hoped that the coupon system would inhibit corruption; PI, with corruption part of the air we breathed, could have told them otherwise. Change the colours every month, match the serial numbers to individuals, thumbprint every one on surrender – and the wicked would still find a way. Coupons, of course, were not money. . . oh, but they were! They could not be hoarded but they could be lavishly spent. Small profit, quick return – for counterfeiters.
Also, Intelligence used them as bribes for squeals, with fine fakery to make the computers sit up and say thank you. The morality of corruption depends on which hand you are using when you say it, taking care the left doesn’t know what the right is handling. We used corruption to achieve what we thought justifiable ends. Moral views, anyone? Cultural imperatives, meaning morality, change with the weather.
Real corruption flowered among the departmental heads who controlled manufacture, import and distribution of goods. Goods could be rendered untraceable and unaccountable more easily than coupons; no computer system could trace the passage of an item through a dozen hands that never hit the keys. The State didn’t try. What it did was employ PI to discover who among the Very Big Sweet plundered more freely than his value to the State could justify overlooking. After which a fe
w heads rolled down to Swilldom and the rest understood the signal.
Mrs Parkes, Superintendent under the Minister for Seaborne Import, did not need the signal – she had never been greedy.
We had never nudged her; most of us had some sympathy for her. She had taken over the business (when ‘business’ still meant ‘finance’) when her husband died because she had a sharp enough nose for decay to see that selling out and living on a fixed income could end badly in a crumbling future. What she hadn’t smelled out was the network of pressure and counter-pressure, social as well as financial blackmail, in which dead Raymond Parkes had kept his business afloat in a sea of sharks. She had to conform or go under, and ‘under’ was Swilldom.
In classic morality she should have taken her problems to the law, trusting virtue to see justice done, but the law has never in history recognized ‘virtue,’ preferring aseptic ‘duty’ and malleable ‘right’ to keep its verdicts untrammelled, and she knew it. Honesty would have blown sharks, networks and herself clear out of the water, into which all of them would have fallen back to sink without trace.
She chose the life of subterfuge and iron nerve. I’d have chosen it, too. We do right when the cost is bearable but morality flourishes among those who won’t suffer by it.
All of which amounts to this: we knew and she knew that we knew, so she would grant me a simple favour.
Camberwell is on high ground, comfortably safe now though one day it will be part of a chain of foggy islands between the drowned city and the Dandenongs, The Parkes house is old, built when architecture still imitated English styles. This one I classified as satisfied-sedate, not the sort of place to be the center of a spider-web with an uncomfortable but gutsy spider brooding there; intrigue and sleight of accountancy would be conducted with well-mannered aplomb. It was all old weathered walls, pillared veranda, high windows dropping to within a hair’s breadth of green-red-yellow mosaic tiles, a hovercar pad discreetly nestled among ornamental trees and lawns, lush and green and water-greedy in a land of acute shortage. The State valued Mrs Parkes and would continue to do so while she tickled the national till without ransacking it.
She was too sensible to conduct clandestine operations in her City Center office where jealous ears would be cocked for titbits. Double, double, toil and trouble – meaning young Francis’ split-second accounting – were kept where they could be managed with Sweet delicacy, at home.
The Sea and Summer Page 21