‘Not much. Teddy was there. He’ll tell you.’
She came to where I stood by the window and I was terrified of an emotional outburst that I would not be able to match, but she had a surer sense of occasion than I. She said, ‘I’ll put hot water on and you can bath yourself. You’ll not sit down to breakfast in my house smelling like a polecat. You can have some of your father’s clothes. They won’t fit but they will do for the moment.’ And to my dumbness, ‘Well?’
She was making it easy for me, demanding nothing. I said hoarsely, ‘Yes, Mum.’
Perhaps she had after all asked too much of herself because she did something that took me apart. She played an old, private game that belonged not six years back but nearer to babyhood, placing a finger on her cheek and saying, ‘If you have been a good boy you may kiss me – just there.’
Shaking a little, I did and she grabbed me and we cried. Her tears were squeezed out for a mother’s reasons, mine for the release of tension. The remaking of a bond is no easy thing but at least the remaking was now possible.
That tough streak runs through all the Conways. The moment did its work and she lifted her face to say, ‘My God, but you stink!’ So it was over, more easily than I deserved, and I was shepherded off to the bathroom.
There wasn’t much water (in floodtime!) and it wasn’t very hot but it was a small bliss. My father had been taller and narrower but his clothes did well enough. Their quality surprised me. Had we been as well off as that? Or, in the creeping shabbiness of the State, had the stuff we wore deteriorated, with quality now beyond a make-do economy? It was true that we no longer said, ‘When things look up a bit . . .’ or ‘When the bad time is over . . .’
In the kitchen I sat down to eggs and bacon, imported tea and real wheat bread – Sweet foods requiring luxury coupons. Swill got powdered egg, adulterated tea, a meat loaf that might be anything, and what they called ‘stretched’ bread, all calculatedly healthy but unappealing.
Training bites deep: I actually considered refusing the contraband until I realized that I would look at best a fool, at worst a hypocrite. Kovacs saw my hesitation and understood it; he had some of Nick’s instinctive insight. ‘Wages of sin,’ he said. ‘The Ma’am pays good stuff for her figure faker.’ And, as I resolutely attacked the food, ‘There now! A copper eating improperly procured rations! I bet that’s a crime.’
Mum said, ‘Don’t bait him, Billy. It isn’t fair.’
‘He can take it.’
I might have blown up if I had not caught his expression, neither sardonic nor mischievous but oddly protective. That I could do without but I said as lightly as I could, ‘I’ve heard of the give-and-take system,’ before it occurred to me that I had heard of it from himself six years before Arry laid it out for me. ‘Now I’ve met it.’
He told me, ‘You’re eating it.’
Yes, of course – eating my pride or whatever. He went on, quite gently, ‘Right and wrong aren’t all that easy – easily – told from each other.’
The bastard was trying to be fatherly. I was glad when he slurped down a second cup of tea with the sound of a pulled plug and said he had to go. ‘Business won’t wait in floods.’ He kissed Mum, raised a jaunty finger to me and walked out like any husband off to work.
With the sound of his footsteps still in the passage I let loose the kind of silliness that animosity breeds. ‘He acts as if he owns the place.’
‘It is his home.’
Her coolness said that my dislike would do well to observe bounds but I had too much of it for restraint. ‘He has another. I’ve seen it.’
She ignored the intent to hurt and said with real curiosity, ‘What is it like? Is it as good as this? It can’t be.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘Dirty? No, it wouldn’t be dirty.’
‘Very clean but crowded, smelly. Why should you care?’
She studied me as though wondering if innocence could be taught. ‘I care for his condition everywhere. I love him.’
Better than Dad? And in spite of his real wife? It was too soon for such violent questions. And there was that simple, brutalizing word: love. I thought of Carol and myself and could not equate us with Mum and Kovacs. Why is it so difficult to imagine one’s mother in love, kissing and fondling and romping on the bed?
‘I don’t know what you see in him.’ Sulky.
‘Because you see nothing? What do you know that’s worth an opinion?’ She was not attacking, only asking.
‘He’s a killer.’
She replied tranquilly, ‘I’ve been told so. It may be true. I don’t know it.’
Nor did I actually know it. It was one of those things ‘everybody knows’ but never questions. ‘And if you did know?’
‘It would make no difference.’ She began, casually, to clear the table. I was the flustered one. ‘You can’t add conditions to your choice once you’ve made it; there’d be no end to that sort of shilly-shally.’
I accused, ‘You don’t want to know.’
‘I would like to know everything about him.’
‘You could ask. He’d tell you, blunt as a brick.’ My spite ran loose. ‘You don’t know where he is or who he’s with right now.’
At the sink, she did not bother to look back at me. ‘I don’t know and I don’t ask. Why trouble a man who has had little sleep for a week but goes about his work because his obligation is to his people? Do you think he’d want a querulous, questioning bitch to come home to?’
There was silence until I admitted, ‘I can’t help it. I hate his guts.’
‘You know nothing about his guts. He was prepared to be your father when you needed one but you rejected him on sight. I won’t blame you for that. I took my time about discovering him. He is a harassed, needing man.’
Needing? Oh, the eye of the beholder! I saw that I was not quite accepted; loved, perhaps, but not fitted in. The emotional axis had shifted in six years and it was I who must seek new balance. Mum would not bend from her choice. As she turned from the sink, wiping her hands, I saw that she had aged more than was right for her years, though still a handsome woman – but a harder one than I remembered, one who welcomed but no longer needed me. Kovacs was the needed love and mine the humiliation of knowing it.
Perhaps to break the mood, she said, ‘It’s Christmas Day and I haven’t a present for you.’
Nor I for her. Goodwill, surely, but not my heart. We had to learn each other again.
She went to the bedroom to dress and came back looking better and fresher. I thought, Too good for Kovacs, and how much easier it would have been without his shadow over us.
We talked, she and I, through the morning, filling in the years until we ran down and were left with make-talk. The emotional moment was past and neither could take cover in sentiment. Whatever was to come must wait on the tolerance of time.
Kovacs came back about eleven, looking tired at last after a week that must have tested his limits. The day had developed in heat and he stripped down to shorts without any beg-pardon. Definitely the man of the house.
What did she see in him? Three-quarters naked he was a thing of knobs and sticks, scarred in half a dozen places and slashed across the stomach in a spectacular cut that must have been close to the finish of him. No doubt he took his risks with courage but so probably did his victims. And there was always the sour-sweet smell of chewey.
I wanted to leave but some residue of good manners blocked the insult of walking out as he walked in. I excused myself and went out to the backyard for a few minutes alone. Mum had made a garden there, too, and lost it to the water but the brilliant sun would dry it in a day or two for her to begin again. As she would. A lifetime of beginning again. And again.
The soft squelch of bare feet told me that Kovacs had followed me out. ‘I won’t go away just for you, Teddy. I won’t ever leave her.’
He was not explaining or entreating, much too sure of himself for that, just making sure that I knew who stood where and wh
ich stood higher. I said between my teeth, ‘You’re not fit for her.’
‘Don’t be silly, boy. I’m what she needed when there was nobody. She didn’t look down her nose.’ I had done that and must pay for it. His tone took on an edge. ‘I’m fit for you, too. Just as good as you.’
So he could be stung. ‘You’re a killer.’
He moved around to face me. ‘I killed a man once. Not for myself, though – for the tower. Somebody had to do it and I don’t farm out my shit work, but that don’t make me a killer.’ In stress he forgot to correct himself. He added in a tortuous access of honesty, ‘I’d do it again if I had to.’
‘Who was he?’
‘That’s a copper’s question. Nick knows who and when and how. You mind your business.’ He produced his rat grin. ‘Would you turn me in if you could pin it on me? It wouldn’t be all that hard to do. Would you?’
Do that to her? So soon? Be a copper with a soul of nickel steel?
‘No.’
‘Then you’ll have to get used to me being around.’
And calling the shots, no doubt. ‘I suppose so.’
‘That hurt. I could hear it. You’ll do all right, boy.’
His confidence drew spite out of me. ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t give me the number-two-dad stuff. I didn’t need my father and I could never need you.’
Mum came to the back door just then, floured to the elbows with whatever she was making. ‘Answer the front door, please, Billy.’
‘Orright.’ He said to me. ‘I know who this is. You’ll be interested. Come on.’ I followed, wondering what more this damned Christmas could do to me.
When he opened the door I could not see at first who stood there with his back to the light, only that he was a young man with good clothes cut to fit. Kovacs gave him no welcome, only waited. There seemed to be meaning in the stillness before whoever it was held out something and said, ‘I have to give this to Mum.’ Francis! Nick at work again?
Kovacs half turned to let him enter and I stepped forward to see him more clearly. He saw me and raised his head like an animal alerted. At fifteen he was thin and set to be tall and good-looking in a tender, slender way, but I had little chance to assess him then. Recognizing me he became absolutely still as if power had deserted him. Only his face altered in startling, furious, whole-souled rejection.
It was as if we stood at bay, until he came to jerky life to toss an envelope down the passage to my feet and cry out as if the words bubbled through spit, ‘You give it to her, favourite boy!’
His look was a desire to maim. I had met dislike enough in my time but not like this. As I picked up the letter he added, like a curse, ‘There’s no need of me here now, is there?’ and walked off and out of the gate like the ultimate Sweet scraping Swill from his shoes.
From inside Mum called, ‘Who is it, Billy?’ and the eternal gameplayer answered with just the right carelessness, ‘Only somebody with a message.’ To me he said, ‘Not nice, not nice at all.’
‘To be hated? Upsetting.’ But that was not what he had meant – he was not considering my feelings.
I gave the letter to Mum, who recognized the handwriting. ‘Mrs Parkes. She always remembers Christmas. She must be a good woman.’
What I had heard of her made her a corrupt, two-faced, double-dealing old fraud. Mum showed me the card, one of those old snow scene things similar to stuff I recalled vaguely from long ago.
‘Silly, isn’t it, but nice. We all used to exchange these once.’ She read out the tinkly, stupid verse on the inside of the fold: ‘Christmas cheers the family nest, Reunion sweet with loved ones blest. Now, how could she have guessed that?’
‘Psychic,’ I said, because something had to be said to take away the sting of my knowledge of the misfire. Like it or leave it, I was the gift Francis should have been.
Later, while Mum cooked and we were alone for a while, Kovacs said, ‘It didn’t work.’
‘Francis? You think Nick was trying it on?’
‘I know it. Well, she got half her Christmas present.’
He did something I can never watch without a queasy disgust: pulled a quid of chewey from his mouth, flattened it between finger and thumb and stuck it behind his ear – ‘for afters,’ as the Swill have it. A filthy habit. All he did, said or pretended was ineradicably of the gutter. So was the gross sentimentality that pursued with, ‘He was a lovely kid.’
‘He was a whining, lying little prick.’
‘That, too. You’ve got no pity in you.’
Said by a Tower Boss! ‘Would you want him back?’
‘Yes. I’m responsible. I made him what he is.’ He made one of those repellent revelations of the heart that seemed to come easily to him: ‘I tried to do what a father should but I got it wrong.’
Rather than hear any more of it I left him and went to the kitchen to talk to Mum.
5
Nick sent for me as soon as I reported in to barracks. ‘Well?’ Meaning, Report in detail.
I said, ‘Thank you.’ If you want detail, dig for it; you command my activities but not my self-knowledge.
Drily, ‘For the experience? Tell me about Kovacs.’
‘He’s not what I thought, but was I supposed to discover that I like him? I don’t! He sickens me. Why did you do it?’
‘To further your education. You’ll have realized by now that the top one-tenth of one percent of the intellects doesn’t constitute much of an elite, that something more is required of a useful mind.’
The end of this imperfect day was to be a Nick tutorial. ‘World awareness,’ I hazarded, ready to be bored.
‘Don’t shit me, boy. High intelligence tends to remove itself from general considerations as though they can be left to the service classes and only the abstruse is worth its attention. Not always, though. Your friend Arry is among the top hundredth of one percent. Did you know?’
I hadn’t known and felt harshly minimized. ‘The quantum cosmos is a pretty special one.’
‘Just a more basic reality. He also likes people and applies his mind to them. He even likes you.’
It seemed I was ringed by do-gooders deciding who and how I should be. To divert the lecture and plant a barb of my own I said. ‘The ploy with Francis fell flat,’ and told him what had occurred. ‘What were you trying to do?’
He was quite upset about it. ‘Trying to make a gesture to bind Kovacs’ confidence closer to me, and I think that worked. And trying to help prevent a crime. That didn’t work.’
‘A crime by Kovacs?’
‘By Francis.’
I should have guessed all along that the ground was rougher than I thought. ‘What crime?’
‘We don’t know yet. But there will be a crime, a real one, not a piddling fiddle with accounts. We aim to prevent as well as catch.’
‘Where do I come in? As family Judas, planted to snoop?’
‘I’m not that stupid. You were a shot in the dark. There was the chance that both of you in a reunited family might help – the deterrent of an elder brother copper always in sight. We try anything that might conceivably work. I’ll have to think of something else.’
‘But why Francis?’
‘Because he is where he is and what he is. He’s selfish, ambitious, Swill-frightened and in a position to do damage. You see that I know a lot about your brother. One day he’ll see a chance and take it in order to burrow himself deeper into the ranks of the Big Sweet whom he thinks catastrophe can’t hurt. So that if the Ma’am goes under the chopper Francis will have friends to shield him.’
While I was thinking, with a small tingle of surprise, how simply and nastily plain this was, he changed tack abruptly. ‘Today’s haul was worth the effort. Three murderers to face trial and a batch of Printing Office clerks and overseers to vanish into the Swill. Who do you think will care? Anybody besides their friends and loved ones? I sometimes think only Swill care for each other. Have you ever met a Sweet who gives a damn for anything except his own sec
urity?’
How fine the Swill, how bloody the rest of us! ‘So what do you want me to be?’ A phrase tickled my memory and I used it before I recalled its origin: ‘Sweet with a Swill heart?’
‘No. One of the new men.’
That was a new phrase from him. A new private belief, like Kovacs’ cull? ‘And who the hell are they?’
He said with sudden forced cheerfulness, ‘I haven’t a clue but they’ll need to be better than the old ones if the race is to survive its stupidities. Goodnight, Teddy.’
God, they say, moves in a mysterious way to perform his little tricks – such as encompassing the fall of a sparrow. There was a crime all right, but Francis didn’t commit it. I don’t think even his self-serving would have connived at this one.
17
Nick
AD 2050
1
When you’ve pulled a real boner, leave well alone. For me that meant, hands off the Conways – but I wondered what Teddy might do about his brother. I saw no sign that he did anything, but surely he wouldn’t just wash his hands of the boy? Then I thought myself into his shoes and asked what he could do – and was unable to think of a damned thing. Francis was a problem with no instant answer.
Teddy went home regularly and made a point of not telling me about it. I was not to have any credit. Nor did I use him as a messenger to Kovacs, not wanting to force that issue.
In those weeks he spoke to me only once of the towers save in line of duty, when he asked out of the blue, ‘Are all tower lifts out of commission?’
‘Nearly all,’ I told him.
‘The man doesn’t come around?’ Arry must have taught him that.
‘He surely doesn’t. Once he did, but the lifts grew older and broke down more often and servicing became more expensive. People found their own ways of coping when the lifts were out for a month or more. They were effective ways, so the State stopped concerning itself.’
‘Deliberately stopped servicing?’
‘That’s it. I don’t know what it saved the annual budget but there are over 1,000 lifts in the towers of this city alone. A whole sub-department was eliminated. The money axe falls wherever it can.’
The Sea and Summer Page 25