Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  And Henry would have been doing a Cromwell, sweet-talking the useful idiots of Hunter’s Alley. I supposed he had spent the last few years organizing like Joe Hill, with pig farming as a useful cover. He was a born politician, an agitator, he meant to change the world for its betterment, no matter how few people agreed, and he had the cruelty – he got that from his father, whose tongue would snicker out and lick his lips when he had something hurtful to say – and charisma to accomplish it. He was working up to the dissolution of parliament. Okay, everyone wanted to get rid of NUG, who had grown intolerably odious to the whole nation, but once it was gone – and in the end all governments did go – what would be in its place? Children, hold on tight to Nurse, for fear of finding something worse.

  ‘It is high time to bring to an end the rule of the fools and knaves, the godless sociologists and therapists who lounge and dribble in Whitehall,’ he would be saying. The room would be smoky with spliff. For years it had been the drug of choice for the young who wanted to change the world. The girls would be looking up at him with adoration. He would be wearing a uniform – brown, with military overtones, rather tight trousers. He would choose one, or even two, of the girls to take to bed: Rosie and Steffie would be his choice, ripe, dusky peaches, not Amy, who looked so cross all the time. But you never knew. He might see her as more of a challenge. I hoped so. I was responsible for her for ever, but she was not my flesh and blood.

  ‘They have dishonoured us by their lies, their contempt of all virtue: they have defiled us by their practice of every vice,’ he would be saying. ‘Their hypocrisy hurts us. With my own eyes I have seen them insult the Lord. They do not believe but they say they do. They live off the fat of the land while their people go hungry. They distort, they manipulate, they lie; where others sing hymns to God they sing their jingles to commerce and control. They are enemies to all good government, they are a pack of mercenary wretches, like Esau they have sold their country for a mess of pottage and like Judas betrayed their beliefs for a few pieces of money.’

  It did not matter really what he said, so long as he sounded as if he believed it.

  ‘We will not forgive them for they know what they do. We will replace these repulsive fools with the New Republic. Ethan, brother, tell us what you have seen in the back of your car.’

  ‘I have seen all sorts of things,’ Ethan will say, ‘some of it rather funny. It’s blow-job heaven. These old geezers on Viagra with the young girls from the food labs. If they want to keep their jobs it’s blow, blow, blow.’

  ‘Amy, sister,’ says Henry, ‘tell us what you have seen at Neighbourhood Watch.’

  ‘I have seen them take the crops that belong by rights to the people, and sell them and pocket the proceeds,’ says Amy. That’s rather tame, but the best she can do. She is rewarded by a smile and the flash of blue eyes. Perhaps she’s the one for tonight.

  ‘Amos, brother, what have you seen?’

  ‘I have seen what goes into National Meat Loaf,’ says Amos. ‘We are eating the cloned bodies of pigs, all right, but as well as those of Jokers, autistics, the insane and other enemies of the State, well laced with a new generation of tranquillizers and SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – and assorted NUGNumbered flavour enhancers.’

  ‘And who presides over this abomination?’ Henry shrieks. ‘Your stepfather, Brother Amos, who like Claudius crept into your mother’s bed before the funeral baked meats were cold.’

  Ah, so that’s it. He’s after Victor.

  And then a squad of CiviSecure would have come roaring up Hunter’s Alley and my family – always quick on their feet except for Victor, who was on the ponderous side – would have been down the garden and over the back wall and melted into the crowds, leaving nothing but a whiff of spliff behind them, and looking for somewhere else to settle in. Gran’s. Naturally.

  CiviSecure use battering rams to break down doors, and never mend them, so the rats come in, and dust and disease, and that’s the end of my property in Hunter’s Alley. It was a nice thought while it lasted.

  Henry Intimidates, Or Thinks He Does

  ‘Would it be true to say you had visitors last night, now.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘And me particularly warning you not to open the door!’

  I explained I had an ex-husband drop by and he said yes, he knew that, and it was not a visitor of whom he approved. I felt obliged to say that, to position myself safely. Henry was really quite a frightening man. Harriet with the broken leg was of the same family as Henry Prideaux, future Lord Protector of the Kingdom, and deserved his respect, which probably did not extend to her boyfriend, though nearing seventy, visiting his ex-wife with a view, however thwarted, to geriatric hanky-panky.

  Henry said in future it would be wiser for me not to receive visitors but to stay in the house. Just until this particular operation was finished. I looked at Amos, whom I had thought so dashing and bad and fine, and Amy, who seemed so plain but strong, and they would not meet my eyes. With Henry in the room other people seemed somehow so weak. I wondered what the particular operation was, after which I would be free to wander at will.

  I had my mouth open to speak but he did not let me.

  ‘Just lock the front door and seal it with superglue,’ he said to Amy.

  Surprise, surprise, and not one safely in the past, like Cynthia falling out of the sky or Karl running off with the Dumpling, but here and now. And blow me, Amy went off to rummage in the drawer beneath the sink and actually found the superglue and fed it into the lock. I wondered if she shared the susceptibility of her mother Florrie that had made the poor child fall in with the Manson gang prototype in hippie California. Probably. I wondered if Redpeace had weapons, and if they did, would they would use them?

  ‘Sure and you’re blissfully self-contained in here I see, Gran,’ said Henry. ‘You’ll be just fine. We’ll make sure you’re fed and watered and you can get on with your writing. Amos tells me you don’t go upstairs.’

  ‘My legs are too weak,’ I said, my plan already forming in my mind.

  He went to the front window and looked down into the basement area below.

  ‘And I don’t think you’ll be jumping down into that, Gran,’ he said. He was right. I wouldn’t. In any case there was a CiviCam trained on the road and Neighbourhood Watch would be round in no time to find out what was going on and there’d be no end to it. If you called the authorities the chances were that you’d be the one to land up in prison. It was the way they worked. Saved time, trouble and paperwork, and led to far fewer complaints.

  He’s forgotten my phone, I thought, but no. Of course not; Henry was not a forgetful person, any more than his father had been – other than the knocker on the door which was why I valued it so. Symbol of at least a minor victory.

  ‘Tell you what, boy,’ Henry said, ‘if you take Gran’s phone we can charge it up for her next door. I’ll be thinking there’s a bit of juice left in the generator.’

  Amos took my phone. If you show no doubt when giving instructions, it becomes natural for others to obey them. People like being told what to do, as Hitler said in Mein Kampf. So long as you tell them firmly enough they feel secure and enjoy it.

  ‘Remind me, too, to bring in a few cans of petrol when we have a minute,’ and Henry gave me the benefit of a sweet smile, Karl’s smile, and it occurred to me that it was a threat to burn the house down, me included in fixtures and furnishings. Henry really didn’t like me: but I daresay the circumstances of his birth gave him reason not to. And heaven knows how Venetia and Polly had presented me to him. Let alone Harriet of the broken leg. Edgar would have made a good job of badmouthing me to her, as men so often do of the women who were once in their lives. That is, if they remember them at all.

  I wondered whether, if Karl hadn’t disencumbered himself of Henry, how the child would have grown up. Was control freakery built into dictators, or was it acquired through childhood trauma? Stalin was well and truly traumatized as a child. Hi
s father abandoned the family, his arm withered up, he was pitted by smallpox, he was stunted in growth. On the other hand Mussolini got on well with his father, and was reckoned handsome, courageous, charismatic, and erudite – if violent as a child. Hitler had a puny kind of sex-life. I wondered what Henry’s was like, and thought it was probably like his father’s, kind of impulsive and frequent. I didn’t want to think about it.

  I know Henry was born on 5 November, a date embedded in my mind, which put his Sun in Scorpio, sign of the dictator. That figured. The emotional manipulator, the creature that stings itself if it has nothing else to sting, even forgetting it was Guy Fawkes Day, dedicated to the patron saint of explosives. Karl’s birthday was June. He was a Gemini. Which twin were you kissing? You never knew. That was part of the charm. If I was going to be imprisoned in my rooms I could look up the ephemeris of the planet’s places on Google and cast Henry’s horoscope. I bet they wouldn’t like that in the New Republic; altogether too Witch of Endory.

  ‘So see you later, Gran,’ said Amos. He didn’t swear in Henry’s presence, I noticed. Oaths will not be a feature in the New Republic. The New Republic is going to be a lot worse than NUG. Henry must be stopped. Victor must be warned that Henry is not a desirable guest in his house, that Henry is a snake in the grass, an adder at the breast, a worm in the apple of NUG, even if Victor does grow pink ready-to-carve human meat in vats. Nobody’s perfect.

  ‘Alligator,’ I say. They don’t know the reference, but at least they go.

  Escape

  I tried the lock in the front door but it was well and truly glued. If it had been me I wouldn’t have done it so well that it actually worked. Liddy, Amy’s grandmother, was good at practical things. She once complained I was a bodger. It is absurd to carry these grudges, these memories back to the other side of the grave. Plan A had just been to defy Henry and leave by the front door, but no. So there was nothing but Plan B. I waited. I watched from my back window the movements between the rows of beanpoles, which during the next fifteen minutes were plentiful. Back and forth they ran, back and forth, shadowy, diving and ducking, as if they were ghostly characters in some computer game. There had been quite a wind in the night and a few more bean leaves had been swept away, so cover was not as good as it had been. Bet they hadn’t thought of that. I waited until movement had ceased, the dark forms were gone, and all was quiet upstairs, when I reckoned they had all left No. 5 to set about their baleful ‘operation’, whatever it was, and I hoped it was minor, not major. More like a procedure.

  I then set about climbing the stairs. Up to the half-landing is fine, just a bit painful, but then the stairs turn a corner and that’s a problem. I have to have something to hold on to and there is nothing. My balance is not too good, and I fear falling backwards. I hate being old. I am not yet accustomed to it. If I do the stairs on hands and knees and use a cushion so the contact with knee and floor is not accompanied by dreadful crumbling noises from within, as if something internal is splintering, that might work. I try. I can. There is usually a way out. I need to get to Polly, who will get me to Venetia.

  Once on level ground the passage from the landing to the room where once Karl and I had our bedroom is no problem.

  I should have had my knees replaced when I could have, but I put it off and put it off and one day there was no money left to go private and the NHS had ceased to do hips and knees. All services for geriatrics had seized up. What small money there was, what few skills left after the Great Immigration, when so many in the health services went home to practise medicine in their own countries, were reserved for the fertile and economically productive. It made sense: there were fewer of us old ones left to stare forlornly into space in nursing homes, longing for an end nature had devised for us and the doctors barred to us. A long life expectancy had ceased to be a matter of competition between the nations.

  And yes, the wall is a mess. They have indeed broken through to No. 5. They have not bothered to sweep up plaster, or square off the ragged hole they have made. They have taken down the painting on the wall – a Samuel Palmer fake – and leaned it against the wall facing outwards, where it could get kicked or damaged. Anyone with any sensitivity would have placed it facing inwards. But then the New Republic will probably ban art as frivolous. I wish I could remember what NUG’s view of art is – I get fact and fiction blurred in my mind. Is Venetia really having an exhibition at the Medici Gallery under NUG’s auspices, or was that just something I wrote? Sometimes what I invent comes true anyway. Friends say I am prophetic but I just think I’m a good guesser. Anyway I take time to put the painting so that it faces inward and is safer. It may be a fake but sometimes the skill that goes into a fake is greater than whatever went into the original: it’s just the motive one suspects – money rather than art. I suppose it makes a difference. It’s meant to.

  I am aware that I must hurry: they may be back any minute. I go through the hole into No. 5. I need to get out of here. It’s the living room of my one-time neighbours, Timothy and Sandra Croxton. I haven’t seen them for some time – I thought they were away, but I think Amos was right. They are gone. The walls are bare of pictures; none of their nice Danish furniture is left. I hope it was not the bailiffs, and they managed to take the stuff with them when they skipped the moon.

  Go back a hundred years and this street was full of couples who skipped the moon, that is to say failed to pay the rent and left secretly by night. Nothing changes. The rent became the mortgage, that was all. A diet of avocados and lemon veal took over from mutton and potatoes, but I daresay the sum of human happiness, human anxiety, remained about the same. I wish they’d said goodbye, though. I wonder why not? Shame? The security cameras? I wouldn’t have snitched on them, warned the Neighbourhood Watch. I am a loyal kind of person, to friends, family, neighbours. I think. I wonder how much I want Venetia to stay with Victor because of my second-hand access to the Grade 1 CiviStore. Coffee and rice and all things nice.

  Thinking about the Neighbourhood Watch, how did Amy come to have house plans for the Crescent in her possession? Is she one of the trusted senior watchers? Or is she an infiltrator, a sleeper, an entryist? These hard-left parties changed names and aims after the end of the Cold War, but never really went away. NUG is shamelessly Gramsciist, its aim the destruction of the old institutions, by persuasion through redefinition rather than force, and the collapse of the bourgeoisie. The New Republic? A reflowering of Marxism, like a rose in its autumn blooming, richly fertilized by the end of capitalism as foretold by the master? No, I think perhaps, judging from Henry, something more Stalinist in its nature, favouring direct action, the literal elimination of enemies.

  What I don’t like is the armchair that stands by itself in the all but empty room, and the table next to it on which is laid out a few reels of that sticky stuff that my father called ‘bodge tape’ and the writers of serial-killer thrillers call ‘duct tape’, plus various lengths of cord and a pair of handcuffs. Someone, it seems to me, is going to be held here captive. Yes, indeed, things are hotting up. A kidnapping? Thank God I see no instruments of torture. I don’t see Ethan or Amos standing for that, though I’m not so sure about Amy. Who? Victor? Dr Yuk, as excoriated by Redpeace? No, that is too unlikely even for me. I think the cloning business is just a diversion, for the likes of Edgar to take seriously. I think Henry has bigger plans, greater ambitions. He’s like Yeltsin, waiting in the wings for Gorbachev to be deposed, so he can sweep back on a tank and retake Moscow.

  Getting down the stairs of No. 5 is not easy; there’s the same bend in the stairs to negotiate as at No. 3, but I realize I can put my feet at a sideways angle and stand on tiptoe as the right foot goes down, and then swing the left foot as far to the left as I can before putting it down, and thus, absurdly, descend. As I say, if you want to do something enough, there is usually a way. But I am also on the side of those Carmageddon makers, who aim their cars at little old ladies, the LOLs, and leave them as a splodge of red blood on the g
round. That’s fun: the green blood of alien life forms, legitimate prey, just isn’t the same.

  A Conversation With Polly

  I get out through the back door of No. 5 and cross beneath the arch of beanpoles. The ground is really muddy after last night’s rain. The potato plants are in flower: when they begin to die off it is time to lift the crop, before the blight gets to them. Phosphate rock for fertilizer has to be imported so the crop does tend to struggle. Neighbourhood Watch is setting up some intricate organic waste scheme which should help but does tend to be smelly. I go through the back door of 7 Rothwell Street and find that empty too, with the signs of a swift withdrawal – however will we get our potatoes enriched at this rate? Our sewers will be empty – and go out the front door. The CiviCam dangles from its wires. Out of action. There’s a CiviSecure notice saying it has been reported and will be back in action within twelve hours, but nobody really believes it, or fills in the Security Postbox forms (Working For A More Satisfied Community) to report malefactors.

  I half expect a car to come racing round the corner and down the road to knock me over and kill me, but all looks peaceful. I have an odd feeling that had I come out on to Chalcot Crescent exactly that might have happened. As it is, I escape unseen. But who would want to kill me? I’m an old lady and harmless, though unnecessarily taking up the nation’s resources. I know nothing; I am from Barcelona. I am no more worth killing than is Polly. I am Victor’s mother-in-law, and that should keep me safe. Unless Victor is the source of all the trouble: it is Victor who is to be sat duct-taped in an armchair at No. 5 and wait – till what? His ransom is paid? That seems possible. Though why would his family, my family, collude in the crime? Mervyn, conspicuous by his absence, might be the one to ask. And perhaps I know more than I think I do? The absence of torture implements is no guarantee that they’re not hidden in a cupboard. Oh, the fevered imagination of the old! If only I hadn’t had a life so full of surprises I could view it with more equanimity. It is just that in one’s experience so much of what is imagined turns out to be true. It’s almost as if one thinks of it, and lo, it happens. The Shock, the Crunch, the Crisis, the Squeeze, the ‘Recovery’, the Fall and the Bite, are in this case all my fault. The world unfolds before one in the way one expects. Perhaps we all have our own individual universe?