Inner Circle

by Jerzy Peterkiewicz

  Inner Circle

  By the same author

  THE KNOTTED CORD

  LOOT AND LOYALTY

  FUTURE TO LET

  ISOLATION

  THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

  THAT ANGEL BURNING AT MY LEFT SIDE

  © Jerzy Peterkiewicz 1966

  MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED

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  Contents

  Book One

  Surface 1

  Underground 27

  Sky 49

  Book Two

  Surface 65

  Underground 83

  Sky 107

  Book Three

  Surface 129

  Underground 148

  Sky 168

  Book One

  Surface

  1

  Our neighbour has a turret of a neck, long, sinewy and vigilant. This might be useful for picking up information, but we have to squash him against the box whenever we go round. For the circle must stay as it is, unbroken. Sometimes he clings to the hook on my belt and trails behind me for a minute, then he bumps into another cluster of people, lets the belt go, and bounces back to the box.

  ‘We’re well looked after though, aren’t we?’ he keeps assuring himself into my ear as it passes close to his mouth. He probably means the hygiene box: his back touches it, rubs, rebounds and leans against it; could he but turn his whole body instead of craning his neck, the indoor pleasures would be his without queueing. He can’t, because the crowd tends to coagulate near a box or a firmly linked circle like ours. That’s why the five of us cannot risk standing still for long. The others might push right through us. It’s safer to revolve. And a small space inside the circle will remain free and empty as long as we protect it with this turning human hoop.

  A moment ago our neighbour pointed his turret of a neck at our patch of ground and seemed to be measuring it up from his eye-level.

  ‘You’ll have to tilt your heads,’ he said, ‘when the rain comes tilt them well back.

  Like this.’

  He expected at least one of us to look up and see what his neck was capable of.

  This is how he often tries to attract attention. My first wife happens to be called Rain.

  Now she smiled at the sound of her name. But she knew as well as I did that the real rain was very rarely allowed to pass through the openings in the adjustable sky above the millions of heads like ours, which were at this moment bending, tilting, swaying, nodding and eyeing one another all over this jewel island set in the sea we couldn’t enter, cross or watch from the air. Precious indeed was the jewel, and hard, and bare.

  ‘If you make a hollow in the earth the size of a fist, like this, look’—came another piece of neighbourly advice—’if you do this at night, moisture will collect inside, and then things might grow.’

  Things: we all searched for things under our moving feet, anything roundish and black that could be a seed, or some bit of a twig, or just a splinter. The night before, I had wedged one in and it looked like a morsel of weed; my foot gnashed on the gravel, perhaps the thing went too deep or slid to the side. It wasn’t worth telling the others.

  ‘What’s your name?’ This time I craned my neck to show him that mine too, though much shorter than his, could be quick and inquisitive. ‘Your name?’ I almost shouted. Clinging types, especially in crowds near the hygiene boxes, were put off when you asked for their particulars. Not that we went much by names. My second wife, for instance, was September. There were thousands of Septembers whirling about in this area between the Kent coast and the dried-up marshes of London. And the month of September apparently kept returning each year, though as a rule we didn’t bother about the seasons and the months that were supposed to belong to them. The man was slow in replying: perhaps he had vacated his precious post altogether. No, there he stood, holding his breath for the approach of my ear.

  ‘We met in Leeds, don’t you remember’ He wasn’t put off, merely offended.

  ‘And your own name I know, sounded something like Cliff or White?’

  ‘No, Dover.’

  ‘Dover! But of course! We met in Leeds, you see. You had no wives then, I distinctly remember. You said you had lost one that could have been a wife, when that big stampede started. You remember the stampede at Leeds, I bet you do.’

  ‘Oh, that—’

  I did remember it, but I wished he wouldn’t, like the rest of them, use those stupid old place-names which in fact signified next to nothing. The sand, the clay, the stones we were milling and wearing out with our feet, year by year, second by second, looked from our habitual eye-angle very much the same, whether the encircled ground happened to be within the imaginary boundaries of something once called London or Leeds or Llandudno. No streets, no vehicles, no plants, nothing that barked, miaowed or bleated.

  My knowledge of traditional geography was no worse than his. The fool was very likely named after Leeds. The necky Mr. Leeds, fancy meeting you again in the same crowd!

  Both Rain and September were staring at me, then Rain halted and the circle stopped. Automatically, we all glanced at the empty centre as if it were to be protected soon against the thudding onrush of feet.

  ‘The cat, Dover, I once carried a pussy asleep in my arms. I should have both my arms free, don’t you think, in case he chooses me again.’

  But she didn’t loosen the grip of her hands. What were her eyes doing! No, Rain never wept. We five, the others, all of us, did many things in the open, but crying-no. It became a freakish sight, a joke of sorts, just like Standing room only, uttered by some of the newcomers at the first surprise of being surfaced among us.

  I had to say something to Rain, and quickly, about the kitten and other transient pets, about cats in general if necessary, before the Leeds man with the prowling neck could pounce on his new opportunity and announce for all of us to know that on this overthronged jewel of ours we humans had every conceivable priority over animals, and that cats were dangerously adaptable even in our congested circumstances; so much so that they would prove a special menace, had they existed still.

  ‘Cats hide in the trees, they climb them, you know,’ September spoke in a tone one occasionally had to adopt to help those who had never seen a creature other than man.

  ‘I’ll be a tree,’ I heard Rain’s threatening phrase, ‘I’ll be a standing, immovable tree, my roots and leaves spattered with the thickest drops of rain, a true, gushing, swishing, slithering rain.’

  ‘Real rain doesn’t stain,’ I said. She liked my rhyme; it had helped her to accept her own name. ‘Keep moving.’ She recognized my command by the change of tone.

  ‘Hand in hand, tighten your grip, look into the centre, look hard—hard into our own centre.’

  This was a moment of danger. There had been and there would be many moments like this: the circle near the point of breaking, because of the two women, my coincidental wives and the two drowsy men, my coincidental brothers whom I had to keep attached to the hooks on my belt because their hands were still so feeble. And above our five revolving heads there hovered a pivoting turret of a neck, watchful for every potential weakness, for a breach, a passage of entry, so that he could penetrate my self-winding system, he a mere parasite, a floater deposited by the human tide near a box so much like any other box.

  ‘We’re well looked after though, aren’t we, Dover? The air’s quite good, hardly any dust these days, considering the constant wear and tear of the surface. A
variety of colours, too. Pink does rather become you, Dover. Amazing how they manage those lights in the sky-roof, don’t you agree? After pink comes pale blue, then music. The island will be full of noises. Soft at first, later rumbling like a distant thunder. Feeding-time. The heavens will open and drop riches into our lap.’

  ‘Into our open hands,’ I said. Leeds opened his, looked at the palms, put them together and pulled a pious expression over his face. Whom was he trying to appease: himself? me! my wives! those who were pushing at him from either side of the box?

  perhaps the skymen? But the skymen didn’t seem to mind what we felt about them, they never interfered, never showed themselves to us and had no apparent desire to communicate with us by any other means. We only saw the shadows of their silent traffic through the coloured domes which looked so transparent when shut, and yet had the thickness of metallic rock whenever they opened, sliding over one another. But the falling flakes of food or the shafts of rain would always confuse the eyes. The traffic shadows were curved and ran at irregular intervals, encircling us like hoops from above.

  September’s knees jerked, her whole body began to sag, although our circle was not yet in full motion. She would soon simulate her fainting fit. I had to risk letting her fall on to the ground in the middle. I grabbed the flabby hands of my brothers and the gap closed at once. She was lying curled up, wriggling her hips and pounding her thighs. I saw Rain watch her with an absent-minded smile as before.

  ‘It’s coming, I feel it. Tell me what I feel, tell.’ September dug her jaw into the earth and became rigid.

  I told her: ‘Remember, remember, your month is September.’

  ‘Bring her into the box!’ Leeds shouted. ‘I’m keeping the door ready.’ He was pressing against it, his neck taut and more sinewy than ever.

  ‘No, it’s not the child.’ My voice was calm. What did he know of September? He couldn’t possibly irritate me this time. ‘My wife’s already been in the box,’ I said.

  ‘She stayed inside the box much longer than me.’ Rain giggled at her own words.

  ‘When I grow into the earth,’ now only her eyes smiled, ‘I’ll have children high up on my branches, until the rain washes them all down. But they won’t go far underground.’

  ‘The earth is good to lie on,’ September spoke into the gravel which was touching her lips.

  This prompted Leeds to say his piece:

  ‘I once lay down for hours, but I didn’t like it. No, Dover, I didn’t like it, remember? Got up all cramps and twitches, scratched myself all over. And yet for years I had been longing to feel what it was really like. When they were stampeding, you know, there was suddenly so much space. Acres of it. You would never have known there could be that much ground under your feet.’ He gasped and scratched his neck.

  Now it all came clear to me, cascading down the lightning of memory.’

  ‘Leeds, you started that stampede,’ and after a pause I muttered, ‘at Leeds,’

  feeling somewhat deflated by the repetition.

  ‘Good, you know my name. As well as I know yours, Dover. It was a great sight, wasn’t it? And the dust, mound after mound of dust. Millions died.’ Leeds was lying this time. None of us ever saw birth or death. Our race had two genders, countless number, we were inside the future, made precise by its perfective aspect. And although some of us could experience the three-dimensional shape of time, we lived here on the surface, never witnessing birth and death; all middle-aged, disposing of our redundant habits in those hygienic containers, large enough to admit three persons and to serve as landmarks.

  Leeds was still talking, propped against the door of the box.

  ‘So you see, Dover, I am fully convinced that man is a standing animal.’

  At this moment music began and as it went on vibrating within the domes, chinks appeared along the lines where the panels could slide over. There was no need to fear intruders sneaking into my circle. Every human in the crowds around me stood calm.

  Arms moved up into the air tinged with blue and yellow, and hands were opening in a receiving gesture.

  September was already on her feet, her eyes following the slow descent of food flakes. The hands of Leeds resembled scales balancing the vigilance of his neck.

  ‘I’ve been wondering for some time whether one could start a panic at a serene moment like this!’

  ‘A stampede, why!’

  ‘When we have filled our bellies you’d better admit me into your family circle.

  And then we’ll have a long talk about the ways and means of migration.’

  2

  Leeds is gone.

  This is a wishful figure of speech, but inaccurate like most phrases we brought with us when we surfaced. Gone, departed briskly, walked away in a huff, as if one could re-enact any of these verbs. Leeds simply received a powerful push from the box door; his neck failed to warn him that there were three busy people inside, cleansing themselves, viewing the past, fingering objects and one another, gurgling, prodding and what not. Then he was drawn into one of those sudden whirlpools, he drifted with a crowd, caught his leg in some entangled tubes that come out from the ground like worms, said a rude salutation to whatever nose happened to land on his, and now he was probably on the crest of a north-bound multitude, floating back to Leeds or along a draughty coastal zone, or just bobbing to and fro, a mile hither, a mile thither, as I invariably do when alone and out of the circle.

  Eventually, you are flung out like a pebble, the communal stomach coughs you up, but there is always another haven of a box, a depository.

  Rain and September had already forgotten Leeds. Rain said a while ago:

  ‘There will be much water from the sky, today or tomorrow, and I shall grow leaves.’ She was still looking at September. I wish September could sometimes be against her. I tried so hard from the start to make them see that they were different and that being different didn’t mean for them an ugly face, a lying voice, or a barren womb. But September echoed herself.

  ‘I dropped my child into the earth. The rain will wash it out—Dover.’ Each time she called me by my name, it sounded as if she had thought it up that very second. She believed she had given birth to a boy in the box. Maybe she did, it wasn’t impossible.

  Why a boy, I once asked, you didn’t see him at all, you said. He dropped down heavily, he must have been a boy, she replied, and then1 said my soothing ‘Remember, remember, your month is September.’

  ‘Real rain goes deep, and . . .’ now she didn’t finish because my brothers Joker and Sailor were waking up. I felt their double pull at my hooks, then their right feet jerked forward, kicked the gravel and began to rummage in the clotted sand. Soon they uncovered two metal discs, lifted them together with the tubes that were buried in the earth, adjusted them for length and inserted their organs. No effort to speak of, no discomfort. Whatever we excreted was sucked into the subterranean channels, you could sense a pressure throbbing in the tubes when you held them, but that seemed to be the only evidence of the mechanism at work. And you never worried whether you would find a disc within the range of your moving feet: the whole island was studded with them, they made you trust the surface you trod on; the surface had been well prepared for the future which we now inherited from our ancestral expectations.

  Click, click, and the tubes slipped in, swallowed by the pressure. The metal muted the sound, and the feet, out of habit, kicked some sand over them. Now my coincidental brothers were ready to relieve themselves of whatever their drowsy heads had accumulated by night: being the last to surface, they hadn’t as yet shed the dregs of an earlier memory which attracted this and that from the mental traffic that passed over us like the shadows on the other side of the domes. Had I not called them brothers, they would still be roaming aimlessly at the edge of crowds. Sailing from bottom to bottom, as Sailor put it for Joker’s appreciation. Sailor was fond of asking me:

  ‘How do you know we are your brothers!’ This was an intelligent question.

>   ‘Because to me you are two.’ This they accepted, it made sense to them and also stood for a sign which I wanted to see in them. They already thought of themselves as two. So did my wives, though being female they couldn’t separate the trees they each desired to be and the babies they each bore and lost or imagined they had borne and lost.

  To impose family ties and to reinforce them was my purpose. I invented and repeated their names, I listened to their talk and gibberish, I gave them the security of a circular motion and the freedom of the patch they could watch and lie in, one at a time, wriggling in remembered pain, resting or just gaping at the shadows of the skymen’s traffic.

  I created the circle and the circle was beginning to create relationships. Leeds could have disrupted my work, I knew the migrants of chaos, I had seen panic and stampede more than once. But Leeds was gone and receding, adrift on his own sea of troubles. And the island had safety zones along the shores, against which no tempest was tall and strong enough to raise its foaming fists.

  Joker had a story to tell. I was glad for Rain’s sake that a cat came into it, or rather couldn’t come out of it, as soon became obvious.

  ‘Once upon the other side of time,’ Joker began, ‘there was a real cat sitting in a blue plastic saucer, and the saucer was floating in a pond, and the pond was filled with milk to the brim. Now the cat couldn’t swim and he couldn’t get at the milk because each time he bent his big head the saucer tilted and the cat was afraid of falling into all that white milk. So he sat and sat in his blue saucer, and licked those few little drops of milk which he had caught on to his whiskers while bending. And then his wet whiskers dried in the sun and became so stiff, long and straight that the cat couldn’t pass through the reeds near the edge of the pond.’

  ‘How do you know that he had whiskers!’ said Sailor.

  ‘Because we both know it from that picture.’ This satisfied Sailor. They must have seen something like this on a micro-screen in the box.

  Rain looked now at Joker now at me with glittering blue smiles in her enormous eyes. She didn’t, of course, understand what the pond, milk or the reeds meant, she had only a hazy idea about swimming and drowning, but the cat sounded familiar and warm which she liked as much as my constant repetition of her name. Blue, too, was the colour which belonged to her. She didn’t care what happened to Joker’s cat in the end. The word cat was all she wanted to hear, and each repetition titillated her smiles. But I was curious to catch the end of the story by its whiskers.