A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  The facts of life

  Uncumber can just remember the arrival of Sulpice. It was when she was three. A large parcel arrived through the delivery tube for her mother, and her mother became strangely excited and shy about it.

  “What is it? What is it?” shouted Uncumber. “Is it for me? Is it my birthday?”

  “No, it’s somebody else’s birthday,” said her mother, laughing in a strange way, and blushing, and kissing Uncumber as she tore the wrapping off the parcel.

  There inside was a transparent container, full of liquid. And in the liquid, rolled up in a ball with its eyes tight shut, was a tiny baby!

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” cried her mother, laughing and crying. “Isn’t he beautiful? Look at his little feet! Oh, Cumby!”

  “Is he really for us?” asked Uncumber doubtfully.

  “Yes, Cumby, he’s your brother!”

  “But how did they know we wanted one?”

  “Because, don’t you remember, Daddy and I sent off the things to make him with, and asked them to make us a little boy? Don’t you remember, Cumby? Now let’s look at the instructions for unpacking him….”

  What happens when you die?

  “Do you die when you get old, Mummy?” Uncumber will ask one day.

  “Sometimes,” her mother replies.

  “What happens to you when you die?”

  “Oh, you take some special medicine, and you get better again.”

  “But I mean, if you really, really die?”

  “Well, if you really die very badly, then I suppose you’re put in the tube, and you go on to another place.”

  “Which tube? The waste tube?”

  “I suppose so….”

  “And you’re chopped up into little pieces, like the old packaging?”

  “I think so…. But really, there’s no need to worry about it, it won’t happen for hundreds of years yet.”

  “Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds?”

  “Well, hundreds.”

  Uncumber thinks about the great world outside the house, from which one arrives so neatly packaged, and to which one returns so finely ground.

  “What’s it like outside, Mummy?” she asks.

  “Well, you know, dear,” says her mother, exasperated by the metaphysical unanswerability of this question. “You see it in the holovision chambers all the time.”

  “No, I mean, what’s it really like?”

  “That is what it’s really like. Don’t ask silly questions, dear.”

  Animals

  One of the earliest of Uncumber’s remarks to pass into the family folklore will be about the repairmen. Whenever something goes wrong with the house—when the protein supply gets blocked, say, or the holovision chambers go on the blink—the repairmen come down from the sky and strip panels off the outer walls until they find the fault.

  One day she will hear the familiar clink of their tools on the other side of the wall, and their muffled talk and laughter, and she will say, “The animals are there again!”

  It’s all mixed up inside her head with some holovision programme she has seen. She thinks people live inside, and animals outside.

  And she takes everything so seriously. One day her mother will find her tapping back to the repairmen! And the repairmen answering her taps! She will be only five at the time, so her mother will be more amused than alarmed. Who but Uncumber would have managed to get in communication with the outside classes at the age of five! But when her mother gently dissuades her, Uncumber is furious. She weeps and throws herself on the floor, and shouts that she wants to see the “animals.”

  “Oh, come on, Cumby! You see plenty of animals.”

  “No, I mean see them! Really see them!”

  “Anyway, they’re not animals. They’re people, just like you and me.”

  “Why are they outside, then? Why aren’t they inside?”

  “Some people are on the inside, some are on the outside. That’s just the way the world is, Cumby.”

  Tapping at the animals—this becomes another of the family’s jokes, of course. But at the time Uncumber gets almost hysterical about it. She has to be quietened down with a quick shot of calmant. She will need many more such shots throughout her childhood.

  Sulpice will be quite different. He will be amenable and easy-going from the first; a delightful child, who never gives his parents a moment’s anxiety.

  Incidentally, their father’s name will be Aelfric, their mother’s Frideswide. These names will seem ridiculous and embarrassing to Uncumber when she gets old enough to mind about such things. No doubt they will be rather old-fashioned by then. Why, she will wonder miserably, couldn’t they have been called something sensible? Frumentius and Osyth, for instance, like her friend Rhipsime’s parents.

  Of course, if they had been called Frumentius and Osyth she would no doubt have found something funny about these names too. This is the way children always repay the thoughtfulness of those who ordered them—particularly Uncumber. She will be a difficult child!

  Out

  Uncumber and Sulpice have this game they play, of trying to get out. It is one of their legends that somewhere a secret door exists into the outside world. They whisper about it together in corners, and draw up plans, and press and peer and pry among the soft, yielding surfaces of the walls and ceilings. For Sulpice it is a purely metaphysical quest; he is not an imaginative child, and the idea that the search might actually have an outcome never occurs to him. If it did, he would never dream of taking part.

  But one day—when they are not even looking seriously—they find the secret panel! Uncumber must have pressed a switch, or moved some kind of lever—she’s no idea what it was she did. Because when she leans against the wall a section of the upholstery sinks inwards beneath her weight—a kind of door, which opens, creaking, upon a world of blackness.

  They draw back, terrified, gazing into the hole from a safe distance. So that’s how it is outside—black!

  “We must tell Mummy!” says Sulpice.

  But Uncumber won’t let him. She creeps nearer, Sulpice dragging on her arm, and peers harder into the darkness, holding her breath.

  “I can see some stairs,” she says. “There are stairs going up. And there’s a wall. It’s a sort of room.”

  “Come back! Come back!” cries little Sulpice.

  But Uncumber doesn’t answer. She is not at all surprised to discover that the outside world is enclosed by walls, just like the inside one. She puts her head into the doorway, and after she has acclimatized her head for a time, she puts a foot in. Then some tiny noise in the darkness brings all her simmering panic to the boil at once. She scrambles wildly back out of the hole and presses on the projecting end of the panel until the door closes.

  But they don’t forget it. The secret door comes to dominate their lives. Each day they go back to it and open it, to renew their terror. Each day Sulpice pleads with Uncumber not to go in. But each day she does—and each day she goes a little farther. Onto the first step of the stairs! Onto the second!

  “No, Cumby! Come back! Please, Cumby! Don’t, Cumby!”

  Onto the third, and the fourth!

  “No, Cumby! Please come back, Cumby!”

  On so high into the darkness that Sulpice, straining to keep his feet in the inside world while his terrified eyes follow her, can see nothing but a white shape….

  She gets to know the little outside world of the secret stairs by touch. The main differences between outside and inside, she works out, are that outside is dark and rather cold, with unnaturally and excitingly hard surfaces instead of upholstery, and that when she comes back the soles of her feet and the fingers of her exploring hands are grey.

  “What is it?” cries Sulpice in alarm the first time she shows him the grey discoloration.

  “It’s dust,” she explains. “It’s something they have outside. I’ve seen about it on the holovision.”

  At the top of the secret stairs the outside world broadens out a
little, she discovers, into a slightly more capacious darkness. She explores every inch with her hands, murmuring reassurances all the time to Sulpice, whose frightened questions filter up from below with the last ghost of the reflected light: “Are you all right, Cumby? Are you still there, Cumby?” The outside world, she discovers, is bounded on all sides by walls, floor, and ceiling.

  She is strangely disappointed at the smallness of it. The complete lack of animals troubles her, too.

  And outer still

  And then, one day when she is up in the little outside world at the top of the secret stairs, her elbow bangs against something sticking out. She pulls at it, and a great section of wall comes swinging back, filling the darkness with light. A whole new world opens in front of her, unbounded, unrecognizably confused—the real outside, as she grasps at once.

  It all happens so suddenly, and what she sees is so strangely expected and yet unexpected, that she cannot afterwards remember at all clearly what it was. The first thing she notices, while she is still blinking in the sudden light, is the air. It moves! Erratically but tangibly it comes swirling in around her, whipping her hair into her eyes, rubbing over her skin with a strange coldness, so that she wraps her arms round herself to keep it out. And with the air comes the feel of dampness, and a smell—a wet, rank, vegetable smell.

  The light, as soon as her eyes have adjusted to it, is diffuse and grey, not at all the sort of light that the holovision shows in the outside world. And the colours are all dim and muted. If she expected anything, from watching the holovision, it was a brilliant clear blue bowl of sky, green-blue tumbling seas, yellow sands. But the sky is a dusty grey, brightening in places to lemon-yellow. There is no sea or sand, only a muddle of trees and undergrowth in greys and browns and mouldering dark greens.

  She steps through the door. She is standing on the flat roof of the house, and all around, in every direction, is the choked dark tangle of the forest. She makes out straight lines and rational curves among it—grey pipes and wires running in every direction, intersecting at the grey pylons rising from overgrown clearings, and dipping down everywhere to other blind houses like her own. In some places the weeds and brambles are growing out of a crazed pattern of cracks in some hard grey substance—one of the old roads, perhaps, which used to cover the inhabited world like a net, now abandoned and returning to the disorder they were stamped upon.

  The first object with any notable colour in it that Uncumber sees is one which she doesn’t at first recognize—a dull orange-red disc hanging without visible means of support in the yellower part of the sky. Black flakes flutter down and settle on her shivering shoulders.

  And then the wind swirls harder, and the door slams shut behind her.

  Blue skin

  Uncumber beats her palms against the door and screams. She shivers with cold and blind terror. To be shut out alone in this huge unpeopled muddled grey nothingness! She presses herself against the door, as if trying to melt back into it.

  She is not alone for long. There is a loud, complaining whine from the sky overhead, and another house comes swooping down. She watches it over her shoulder, hypnotized into silence. It stops a few feet above the roof, a door opens in the bottom, and two men jump out.

  At first she scarcely recognizes them as men. They’ve no skin! Or no normal skin. From neck to toe they’re covered in a strange dark blue stuff! Is it dark blue skin? Or is it something they have wrapped round outside their skins? She begins to scream all over again.

  “What’s the matter, love?” asks one of them.

  “Locked out, are you?” says the other.

  “Come on, now, be a good girl.”

  Their voices sound human enough, even rather reassuring. All the more frightening, that these strange blue skins should have reassuring human voices!

  She closes her eyes, fills her head with scream, and makes a wild, inhuman effort to press her body through the solid door.

  You never know who you may meet

  In which effort she succeeds.

  She tumbles headlong back into the house as the door is flung open by her father. He has come running, white-faced, up the secret stairs to look for her, warned by Sulpice. There are confused explanations between her father and the men in the blue skins; then father and daughter are stumbling back down the stairs, and Mother is giving everyone, including herself, shots of calmant to restore some sense of order and sanity to the house.

  When at last they are all entirely calm, and Uncumber’s sobs have died away, Aelfric asks her gently to promise that she will never ever go outside again. She nods, still too shocked to speak.

  “For a start,” he explains, “you might get ill, Cumby. If you’ve lived all your life in air that’s specially clean, and just the right temperature, you can’t expect to resist the heat and cold of the air outside, and all the dirt and infection it carries. Those Kind People who found you—they were wearing clothes, weren’t they, and special masks over their faces? You can’t go outside without wrapping your body up to protect it.

  “And secondly, you never know who you may meet out there. You see, Cumby, not everyone in the world is the same. There are different sorts of jobs which have to be done, and different sorts of people to do them. Some of us have to spend our lives inside, doing all the world’s thinking and arguing and persuading. Somebody has to persuade other people that their little girls need more dolls to play with, for example. Somebody has to decide what we’re going to do about the world’s air shortage. And so on.

  “So of course people who do this sort of job have to sit at home, just as I do, so that they can see what’s going on in the world at the touch of a switch, and talk to all the people they have to talk to, and be in touch with all their various thinking and doing machines.

  “But then of course there are other people who have to work outside. If your new doll gets jammed in the delivery tube on its way here, someone has to go out and unjam it! Someone has to put the delivery tube up in the first place! Well, this is the job of your great friends the ‘animals.’ Only, of course, not all animals are clever enough even to do this sort of work. Nowadays the four-legged animals don’t usually do any work at all. It’s just the two-legged ones, who can talk and think like us.”

  Uncumber thinks about all this. “Where do they live?” she asks. “In the trees?”

  Her father laughs. “No, no,” he assures her. “They have perfectly good homes.”

  “Like ours?”

  “Well, a bit different, because as I say they’re rather different sort of people.”

  “Were those two men in the blue skins animals?”

  “Sort of. They were Kind People, who go round in their flying houses, helping people in trouble and keeping an eye on things. Because, you see, not all the animals in the forest are nice. Most of them are. But some of them try to get inside the houses, to hurt the people and take all the things away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re unhappy. But you see why we were so worried when you went outside? Inside this house you’re part of a secure and happy world which stretches all over the globe. Step outside it, and you’re in another world altogether—the old primeval world, Cumby, where anything can happen.”

  Aelfric knows what he’s talking about, too. He’s a decider. All day he sits watching the holovision manifestations coming in from all over the earth, as often as not of events in the outside world, deciding disputes between people and “animals,” or between “animal” and “animal.”

  If other people knew what he knows, they wouldn’t go round the way they do, shouting about the “animals” being really just as happy as anybody else. In his private opinion, everyone in the outside classes is unhappy, or else ready to start being unhappy as soon as your back is turned. If he had his way, he’d put the lot of them on compulsory medication.

  Dark glasses

  They live a bit like animals themselves, Uncumber and Sulpice, while they are still young—playing toge
ther, running about the house, taking tumbles, and being picked up to be kissed and comforted by their parents. Children need this physical, tactile experience, of course.

  But as they grow older their lives become less physical and more private. Another room will be added, for Uncumber to move into, and the more she and Sulpice become involved in absorbing educational holovision, the less chance either of them have to go out of their rooms. Their parents will gradually find it more convenient to manifest themselves to their children at the touch of a switch, rather than drag themselves wearily to their feet and come looking for them in the flesh. And as the brilliant physical energy of early childhood subsides, and the lethargy of adolescence approaches, the children find it easier to do the same, even with each other. From one day’s end to the next they scarcely move out of their rooms—hardly even shift off the gentle cushion of air which keeps them comfortably suspended an inch or two above their couches, except to exercise their muscles on their private exercising machines.

  And they enter upon another, more intimate privacy. They are no longer allowed to go naked, but are expected to wear their dark glasses all the time, like adults. Uncumber will have tantrums about this, of course.

  “Why do I have to wear them?” she will ask, pouting, sprawling back on her air layer rebelliously.

  “Because it’s not decent to go around with bare eyes at your age,” her mother explains. “You don’t see me or your father going round with bare eyes.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because it’s not decent, that’s why not! You want to keep some things to yourself, don’t you? You don’t want everyone seeing exactly how you feel and exactly what you’re thinking all the time. It might put ideas into their heads.”