by Fay Weldon
I should never have bought him out of his half of the house, he said. It was morally his and I should have acknowledged it.
‘You made me angry,’ I said. ‘You and the Dumpling.’
‘She was a very pretty girl,’ he said. ‘I like women with something to get hold of.’
‘How very old-fashioned of you,’ I said.
‘Always ready with a smart reply,’ he lamented. ‘If you’d been faithful to me, I’d have been faithful to you.’
And then the Czech family finally left, and I lost interest in writing and the money dried up, but I couldn’t get used to not spending it. And the credit was infinite as the offers of loans and mortgages flooded in, and the store cards and credit cards, and everyone else had money and jobs and student loans, and a million jobs were created for civil servants to micro-manage our lives, and I began to think that perhaps Edgar was right. They were purposefully stripping us of initiative, individuality and common sense – in our best interest of course – so we turned into new versions of the old Soviet citizen, controlled by our debts rather than by the KGB, dependent on the State’s mercy, all thinking the same convenient thoughts, sharing the same ethics, the private sector withered away, the village fête cancelled because of Health and Safety, the churches emptied, and the shopping malls filled, and then it all stopped.
Some say this is no accident: some ask, did Prosperity fall or was it pushed? Some say this is just the next stage in the game, to crowd out private enterprise and make us servants of the State. The first bank that went belly up had its feet pushed out from under it. Some know better than to say so aloud. I have a feeling those young people in the room upstairs are saying it and it is not safe, and this is my house, and that means I am not safe either. Except I am so old it’s really not going to matter to anyone what I think. I shall just nod and shrug and stare and claim Alzheimer’s.
The Shock, in October 2008, and after that the Crunch, and the Crisis, and the phoney Recovery, like the phoney war – and then the Squeeze and Inflation and now the Bite, and the rest is history, or the future – and Henry, misbegotten Henry, from the loins of Karl and the Dumpling’s womb, who killed his mother by being born, for which I suppose I should be grateful, is at the door, and history begins to form again as future.
For Henry too, like Amy, Florrie’s daughter, comes at me out of the past, karma, come to take stock and be revenged. Amy to claim Ethan as her own, because I failed to look after Liddy and Florrie when they needed me. And Henry, for all I know, has some mad feeling that he is morally entitled to this house, which was his father’s in the beginning. Then he has another think coming, is all I can say. But I feel quite panicky. What is he doing here? How can he know where I live? Except of course, I realize, he is Polly’s half-brother and Venetia’s too, only not directly connected to her by the flow of genes, and I have managed to deny his existence all this time. I will call Polly, to find out if there is anything I need to know.
Amos is coming into my room.
‘Still scribbling away, Gran?’ he asks. Scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon! That’s no way to endear himself to me. I sigh and put my work aside.
‘Well?’
A Strange Request
‘Gran, could we ask you a favour?’
Well, that’s something. I am not so irrelevant to their lives that they don’t feel obliged to ask. What can it be? To stay the night? Why don’t they all crowd into the little house in Hunter’s Alley, and foment rebellion as much as they like, without getting me into trouble, I ask him.
‘Well, actually, Gran, Hunter’s Alley is under surveillance, so it’s not all that much use to us.’
‘Why is Hunter’s Alley under surveillance?’
‘Because it’s so central. Here we’re practically in the suburbs, but not so far petrol is a problem.’
It sounds so reasonable but is obviously mad. Perhaps he’s schizophrenic – the Knight’s Move in chess. A sideways move between a thought and its conclusion, that at first convinces but not for long. Schizophrenics can drive their therapists nuts.
‘What we wanted to do, Gran, was break through upstairs into No. 5 and settle in there, then we wouldn’t disturb you.’
‘How very thoughtful of you. Through the window you broke? Wouldn’t the people at No. 5 be the ones to ask?’
‘No, No. 5’s been repossessed. They’re not there. But Amy’s got the plans from the Neighbourhood Watch: there’ll be no structural damage; we can put it back when we’re finished so no-one knows. We just need a place to store posters and stuff. It would be safer for you to have it next door, not here.’
I am baffled.
‘How do you know it’s been repossessed?’ is all I can think of to say.
‘Uncle Henry has it on his list.’
Uncle Henry? What has been going on behind my back? I suppose it is technically true. Henry is Polly’s half-brother. But no blood relation of Amos. Why should he know him as Uncle? Why does he know him at all?
‘What list?’
Redpeace, it transpires, are the ones going round putting up the NUG Scum posters. Uncle Henry is a leading activist. More, they don’t just want to break through my wall, they mean to unseal the back door of No. 5 and go in and out from No. 7 Rothwell Street, which backs on to the Crescent, unsealing that door too. They can get in and out across the communal garden, shielded by trees and beanpoles, without being seen.
I tell Amos not to be so infantile. What kind of games were they playing? This was not Munchkinland and no time in history to be messing about with politics and annoying authorities. A lot of people have been vanishing from the streets lately. I did not believe this: it is only rumour, but I am not averse to adding to rumour. Amos just smiles in a way that makes me think he can read my mind. I am beginning to feel cold. This is not safe. Perhaps the rumours are true?
‘Why are you telling me?’
‘Because you’d hear us and we don’t want you running off telling anyone.’
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I say, ‘I’m family, after all. I think you’re mad but I won’t tell. I suppose the camera didn’t get you coming in but would catch you coming out?’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ says Amos. ‘You’re not daft. We can get a lot of your nice stuff through to next door too, so if the bailiffs come back there’ll be nothing of much value.’
That thought had occurred to me too.
There were already hammering and crumbling noises from upstairs. All the safe structures one took for granted were going. They had not bothered to get my assent. They were going ahead anyway. The hermit crabs were no longer solitary, but clustering.
I had a feeling if I did object, if I stood in their way, they would simply step on me and crush me, eliminate me. But that is a feeling the old do tend to have about the young at the best of times. I dismissed it. They were family. They would look after me. Amy, too, by virtue of being ‘with’ Ethan. Even Henry, if my life was at stake. As for the two girls, they were optional extras, as girls so often are, and did not seem the murderous kind.
Carmageddon
Talking about the universal desire to get rid of the old, other than (sometimes) one’s nearest and dearest, they being such a reminder of mortality, I remember once sitting with the great and the good on a censorship panel in the late nineties. (We were not meant to call it Censorship but Classification.) A ‘graphically violent driving-oriented video game’ called Carmageddon was under review. Should it be banned, modified, given the go-ahead? There was worry at the time, it being one of the first times a game had no traditional moral values at all. If you ran down little old ladies as they crossed the road, you were rewarded. If you swerved to avoid them, you were punished. It was the triumph of amoral relativism: now, it seemed, we were all to be on Sauron’s side. If you got the little old ladies there was red blood spattered everywhere: their walking sticks flew in the air. Odd that it was always old ladies, not old men, or not perhaps all that odd because it was males
who devised these games, and in those days, mostly males who played them.
Unlike anyone else on the panel I played video games myself, and was as it happened particularly fond of Carmageddon. Amos, I think it was, had found me a pirated early copy. I failed to declare an interest; I was ashamed, just as one is ashamed in literary company to be seen reading rubbishy airport novels. But I had noticed since starting to play this absorbing game that I too, when driving, had to rein in an impulse to swerve into little old ladies. If it affected me in my female middle age like this it seemed a very dangerous toy to put in the hands of young joyriders. Still I did not speak. As it happened, the Carmageddon people pre-emptively censored it themselves for the UK market; they just wanted to get on with selling, and for a time replaced the LOLs by aliens with green blood. It was not nearly so much fun to play. Now I am a LOL myself I take great care crossing a road; karma waits around the corner for all of us.
For Cynthia, who took the flight to Turkey, for Terry who took my virginity, for me, who took my sister Fay’s beloved, karma waits.
For the young ones I am not so sure. They don’t believe in karma, so perhaps it doesn’t happen. There are no elements in their self-definition that relate back to any earlier time: to the unchancy gods of the Greeks or the Romans; or the Christian God who can see into your heart; or the Buddha with his renunciation of worldly pleasures, or the Muslims, with their horror of female flesh. So many of the young see themselves as born in year zero: they have no gods, not even an Intelligent Designer. They live on a ball of rock hurtling through space and that’s it. To be a good young human being now is not to play truant, to report to your teachers if your parents smoke or drink in your presence, to reproach them for antisocial thinking and to insist they sort the waste for the sake of Gaia. So dull!
The ethics of the new young come not from a vague mishmash of ancient beliefs but are dictated by the State: how can they not be? And perhaps they should be, considering how suddenly and drastically they were driven from the trashy paradise we’d prepared for them.
Amos and Ethan, Amy and Henry, two bright girls and three more young men I didn’t get to see clearly, all in the business of avoiding CiviCams, breaking through my wall, bringing in contraband ‘stuff’, fighting the system: in the light of NUG, in the light of the bailiffs, in the light of the family history, it was hard not to be on their side.
And yet I’ll swear the god of vengeance lurks, karma is waiting round the corner for all of us, young as well as old. Be prepared to jump, and fast, in the day of Carmageddon.
A Conversation With Polly
After Amos left, after I had promised not to tell, I called Polly, as I had to know about Henry.
‘Polly,’ I said, ‘it’s your mum.’
She was geniality itself. We exchanged pleasantries. She asked how I was; I said, well, except for knees. I asked how she was; she said she was okay, only last month’s wages hadn’t got through to the CiviBank. Their computer had allegedly crashed. But probably NUG didn’t dare print any more money. She’d had a nasty fright on the Underground when some madman tried to push her on the tracks, and might have succeeded only a brave, kind woman had pulled her back. In Polly’s view of the universe, men are always trying to destroy you and women the ones who rescue you, and she loves to dramatize. And Corey had been darning his socks when there was a power cut and he swore and ranted, so like a man.
‘But he is a man,’ I was tempted to say but held my tongue.
He was very much a man, rugger players from Samoa tend to be, muscled where others have fat, skin light brown and polished, a square chin, an amiable demeanour, a delight to behold. All he wanted to be was a man, and all Polly wanted him to be, crudely, was a woman with a penis. It wasn’t that she hated men so much as that she disapproved of them, and regarded them as second-class citizens in need of training.
It was as well, I thought, that she had had stepdaughters, not sons.
I told her Amos was staying with me for a couple of days.
‘What does he want?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know why you’re all so mean about Amos,’ I said.
‘Because he’s always been your favourite grandchild,’ she said. ‘You hardly take any notice of Steffie and Rosie.’
One thing you can say for Polly is she comes straight to the point. She starts with geniality and affection, and then suddenly she remembers a whole host of resentments. She was the same when she was a baby. I’d go into the nursery first thing in the morning and there she’d be, standing in her cot, all beams and smiles and a delight, then her face would pucker and she’d begin to scowl and stick out her chin and look furious, as if she’d start an argument if only she had the words. If she caught sight of Karl the scowl would evaporate, and the smile reappear. But I loved her to bits and still do, and when I die she will be sorry, and feel bad if we have words, so I really try not to. I forgive her in advance.
I am rather relieved that she has brought up the names of the children. I get them muddled or even forget. They are not proper names, just evidence of an unhealthy desire on the part of the parents to keep their children as pets. Who can grow up to be an Archbishop or the Prime Minister if called Rosie, or Steffie? But these were the names they came with, I suppose. Polly is bad enough: I wanted Hypatia, but was pressured by Karl, who liked his women ‘pregnant at the sink and up to their elbows in soap-suds’ as he once said to me – a remark that prompted me to go to my first feminist consciousness-raising group – to call her Polly. She never liked the name. I daresay ‘Rosie and Steffie’ could not be changed without upsetting the children.
‘Polly,’ I say pathetically. ‘I’m over eighty, my legs are bad, and why don’t you all come over and visit me?’
‘Because we can’t afford taxis and there’s no fuel for the car, Gran,’ she says.
I don’t know why she calls me Gran. I’m her mother. Well, I do know. She wants me in my place as a little old lady.
She will never forgive me for not taking Karl back when I could have. Should have. Wanted to, but there was Edgar in the way by then. And I wasn’t going to take on the plain dull little baby dumpling, who was obviously going to grow into the plain middle-aged man I had let into my house. Let Karl take the consequences of his actions. I had had enough.
‘You should jump in a taxi and come over to us.’
Jump? Me? What planet is she on? Though that she is reluctant to accept that I am growing old is comforting. And I’m not going to say I don’t have any money for taxis either, and that the bailiffs have been, because then Polly will go on and on about how badly I manage money, and how I always trusted men whom no women in their right minds would have trusted. How can I call myself a feminist, etc.
I can at least trust Amos not to tell the family about the bailiffs: I wouldn’t even have to remind him: he will understand the subtleties of the situation. That is probably why he is my favourite grandchild, even though I suspect him of being a conman, a terrorist and a madman, and even now he is dismantling my house.
I will be really sorry to leave this life, as soon I must. It is so full of wonder, as well as horror. A surprise round every corner and the pace is hotting up. The GSITS is keeping very busy. The GSITS – the Great Screenwriter in the Sky – appeared in one of my early novels, The Rules of Life. He’s the one who got the commission to script the story of the world. He is a B-picture writer by nature, that’s the trouble: his sights are set low. If he gets into a plot difficulty he does something spectacular and thoroughly unlikely: sinks the Titanic, explodes Krakatoa, kills Kennedy, thinks up Watergate, pulls down the Berlin Wall, has Carla Bruni marry Sarkozy, and the GSITS’s latest plot extravaganza is to bring capitalism tumbling down by way of the Fourth Estate – after the French revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, ‘Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.’ I think the GSITS is on cocaine; he is so feverish at the moment. And dreadfully and d
angerously easily bored. But I have my private concerns to get on with.
I casually bring my conversation with Polly round to the subject of Henry.
‘You know that baby the Dumpling had, Polly –’
‘Don’t call her that, please, Mum. Her name was Claire. You mean my half-brother Henry, Claire and Karl’s child?’
‘Okay, that Henry. Do you see him? I mean, socially?’
‘Of course we do.’
‘Why has no-one seen fit to mention it?’
‘Because you’d have hysterics, Mum. No-one wants to upset you.’
Like hell they don’t. They don’t think twice about keeping secrets. How can I protect them if they don’t tell the truth? And the secrets always come out in the end and I am always upset. Surely they know that by now.
I ask if Venetia sees him too.
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t she? He’s family.’
‘Not by any wish of mine,’ I say. ‘And he isn’t a blood relative of hers. I suppose you have to see him out of politeness but I don’t see why Venetia has to.’
‘Mum. He’s a nice guy. He’s Karl’s child. All this stuff about blood and genes, it’s sheer biologism. You’ve got to get over it.’
Polly goes on about biologism a lot. I am guilty of it apparently. It is the doctrine that men and women were born different, that they have biological differences that cannot be cured by Nurofen or social conditioning. It is why she goes to such lengths to turn Corey into a woman (darning, for heaven’s sake!). I grant you our lot did our best to turn ourselves into men, with our bovver boots, dungarees, aversion to lipstick and refusal to smile (as placatory to men) but once we had our equal rights and equal(ish) pay, we returned to high heels pretty quickly. No amount of evidence that male and female brains are wired differently will convince her. In the beginning, according to Polly, we were all born equal in intelligence, looks, health, charm, colour and gender. If we end up unequal then it is somebody’s fault. Society, or poverty, or lack of education, or racist taunts, or male oppression. In the nature/nurture debate, where most sway between the 60/40 ranges, my daughter goes for 99 per cent nurture, 1 per cent nature. She is in fact denying me.