Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘What happens in a primal scream class?’ Baxter ventured.

  ‘You sit on the floor and scream,’ Patch said, stuffing her mouth with olives and cheese.

  ‘There’s plenty of room here,’ Baxter said. ‘You could have one of the big rooms at the back of the house.’

  ‘It’s a great offer and I appreciate it.’ Patch grinned, brushing aside the suggestion with a little wave of her hand.

  ‘I mean it,’ Baxter said.

  ‘But we’d stop you working,’ Patch said. ‘We like to make a lot of noise when we get together. We have to vocalise our feelings.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference to me,’ Baxter shrugged. ‘I keep my studio in the attic.’

  ‘It would be the perfect arrangement,’ Patch agreed, cracking an olive stone with her teeth. ‘But shouldn’t you ask what’s-his-name?’

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why? It’s my house. Anyway, what does he care what happens here? He spends most of his time in the garden.’

  ‘What’s he doing out there?’

  ‘God knows!’ Baxter said. ‘Honestly, he’s such a pain!’

  ‘Men are strange,’ Patch agreed. ‘That’s why the Mothers like to keep the children away from them.’

  As she spoke she unbuttoned a pocket in her dungarees and one of her breasts fell out. It was a painfully swollen gourd, as richly marbled as the Stilton that its owner had just devoured. The nipple was a crumpled leather thumb. She pulled at the nipple and used it to stab at the baby’s face. The infant struggled, opened its mouth to complain, caught the nipple and clung to it.

  ‘What about the fathers?’ Baxter said, trying to pull her eyes away from the sight of the bulging pap.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well, don’t they care what happens to their children?’ Baxter said. ‘Don’t they want to interfere?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Patch said scornfully. ‘Most of them don’t even know they are fathers. They’re from the wham, bang, thank you ma’am school of screwing. And if you told them they were fathers they’d probably want to forget it. But a few of them—the really jealous bastards—create hell and make life hard for everyone.’

  ‘But I thought there were laws,’ Baxter protested.

  ‘Oh, yeah, there are laws,’ Patch said carelessly. ‘But we’re working on it.’ And then she told Baxter about the Militant Mothers’ demands for a universal sperm bank where a woman could be impregnated under proper medical supervision, without obligation to the donor or having to endure the wrangles of all those men who thought they owned the fruits of your labour just because they delivered the seed.

  Baxter listened with a mixture of delight and incredulity. She imagined a universal sperm bank as a kind of Pangloss Chicken Battery where impatient Militant Mothers clambered into empty cages, hoicked up their skirts and spread their buttocks over nests of glistening caviar. The eggs were warm, golden, the size of pearls. The Mothers poked their heads through the bars and clucked defiantly at the world.

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ Patch boomed when Baxter finally led her to the empty back room.

  It was a dismal corner of the house. A long, unlovely room with a brick fireplace, a pine plank floor and windows overlooked by a dense thorn hedge. Charlie had wanted to build a library here The room contained a solitary bookcase, its shelves thickly lined with dust. It was a waste. Neither of them came to this room. Now it could be transformed into a real nursery filled with cushions and boxes of toys and a finger painting table and perhaps a beautiful rocking horse and the sounds of laughing Mothers and children.

  ‘It looks so bare,’ Baxter said sadly, as she looked around the empty walls.

  ‘We’ll bring some campaign posters and decorate,’ Patch said walking to one of the windows and using a finger to wipe a spyhole in the dirty glass. ‘It will be perfect if we keep it warm and cover the floor. Do you have any carpet? And a few armchairs? And some bean bags? Do you think we could hang a swing from the ceiling?’

  ‘I could paint the walls!’ Baxter said, suddenly full of inspiration.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ Patch said peering at the pattern in the wallpaper. ‘I’ve always like tulips.’

  ‘No,’ Baxter said. ‘I mean I could paint a mural for you. Children love pictures, don’t they? I could paint something big and colourful.’

  ‘You’ve already done enough,’ Patch said. ‘We couldn’t ask for more. What about your own work?’

  ‘Painting is my work,’ Baxter said. ‘I want to do it. Besides. I’ve never attempted a mural. It would be a challenge for me.’

  She could already see a Noah’s ark stranded somewhere beneath the ceiling and a prancing carnival of animals ascending in spirals from the skirting boards. Elephants, giraffes and kangaroos. Lions and leopards and polar bears. And, at that moment with a painful jolt of loneliness, looking at this Mother with the child buried warmly between her breasts, Baxter was suddenly aware that she wanted to be part of their nursery world.

  46.

  I was there! Einstein said indignantly. I was there and I saw everything. They came from every direction and filled the house with their screaming snot-smeared spawn. Twenty full-grown monkey-women with seventy-six grunting carpet crawlers. Can you imagine the noise of it? Can you imagine the smell? Charlie was spared the full horrors of this invasion since, by the time he’d dragged himself home from the office, there was little left on the battleground but a few broken toys and a sour miasma of soft dung and puke. It meant nothing to him. But his faithful four-legged friend was in the very thick of it.

  Why did they do it?

  Why were they so determined to breed and having taken delivery why did they treat their whelps with such concentrated adulation? It didn’t make sense to me.

  Infancy serves no purpose. It’s an apprenticeship to be endured before animals are qualified to take their place in society. It’s a state of affairs to be tolerated but not encouraged by parents. And yet it was obvious that these Mothers were not urging their children towards independence. On the contrary, these Mothers crawled around on their hands and knees, laughing and talking to themselves in a queer and primitive patois. They were teaching their infants to behave like infants. They had no intention of teaching their brats the secret of self-sufficiency. They didn’t want to be rid of them—they wanted them to remain as helpless, boggle-eyed dug-hangers. The Mothers described the ignorant and sorry condition of their whelps as the blessed state of innocence and were quite prepared to murder in order to preserve it. They seemed to believe that drooling, gum-smacking babbledom was the path that led to paradise, a divine blessing, a gift from Almighty God.

  It came as no surprise to find that the Mothers themselves looked very much like overgrown whelps. They were flushed and petulant creatures with a taste for whimsical nursery clothes and pastel-coloured shoes. They wore smug smiles and button badges with stupid slogans. Baby on Board. The Incredible Bulk. Motherhood for these women was the true purpose and function of life. And who dared contradict them?

  By devoting their days to the arithmetic of tomorrow the Mothers hoped to determine the future. But the Mothers weren’t going into the future. They were sending their offspring into the future, like generals sending troops out to fight a war that couldn’t be won. Their children were supposed to be the new hope for a hopeless world. They were the future concert pianists. Hollywood heroes, cosmetic surgeons and liver sausage millionaires. They would succeed where their parents had failed. They would be remarkable. They would be remembered. They would all be beautiful and brave and have brains the size of melons. Mothers had made them from their own flesh and blood. They had invented them to conquer the world. They didn’t know the world was coming to an end.

  They knew, of course, that the world was full of sick and starving babies. But they were Chinese and African and Indian babies. That was different. You couldn’t include the unlucky ones born in the slums of San Paol
o, Mexico City, Calcutta, Bombay, Addis Ababa, Brazzaville, Bogota, Bangui or Cairo. Some of these people were so poor they didn’t have washing machines or freezers. It was so primitive—how could they cope with such unhygienic conditions? Small wonder they caught such disgusting diseases. As far as the Mothers were concerned they might have been a different species forced to survive on another planet where they had no Heinz™ or Johnson & Johnson™ or any kind of welfare programme. It was terrible but the Mothers couldn’t help everyone. They had enough trouble making their fat, best Western babies. You didn’t see fat, best Western babies sick and starving, paraded on poster hoardings with bulging bellies and eye sockets swarming with flies. Thank God, it was still a safe and happy world for them. And the Mothers knew that as long as Ronald McDonald™ appeared on TV nothing was wrong.

  A million years ago Nature had programmed their on-board computers to urge them to breed at any cost, and no one knew how to cancel the programme. The Mothers believed in eternal life, in God’s great game of Pass the Parcel. Their children granted them life after death. Fuck today and live tomorrow. And even if they had sensed that something was wrong, it would merely have served to make them breed with greater vigour and concentration, hoping to outflank catastrophe by sheer force of numbers. Such was their dedication.

  Motherhood was everything. It lent them the power and the glory. It gave them command over life and death. And it also provided a safe retreat from the terrors of the adult world. Surrounded by children they became like children, fortified in a nursery world of sweet milk puddings and Lego bricks.

  A few of the Mothers had axes to grind, there’s no doubt about it. One of the Mothers, a small woman with tight ginger hair and a history of unhappy love affairs, wanted to organise a study group for the Mothers who needed trauma therapy for the damage she felt had been inflicted upon their original state of grace during the brief but unpleasant moments of physical penetration by the men who had fathered their children. These moments might have been brief but they certainly must have done some mischief. The therapy lasted six weeks and included confidential counselling, colonic irrigation and pillow-punching sessions. Her little class of bowel-wrenchers could really make the feathers fly.

  Another Mother was planning to raid a number of private abortion clinics to liberate unborn babies. She’d had a leaflet printed starring an unusually featous foetus with a face like a Burpie™ doll. Beneath this half-baked bundle of joy were instructions for making Molotov cocktails. A recipe she had found on the Intemet. Her idea was simple and savage. The clinic consulting rooms would be bombed and during the confusion the reluctant mothers would be snatched from the beds, driven to a secret location and held until they delivered their babies.

  A third Mother was trying to outlaw the sale and distribution of contraceptives because they encouraged men to think of women as sexual playthings and cheated them of their birth rights. Since contraception was the only protection the women had against several murderous male diseases, it was argued that men be required by law to carry medical cards. She already demanded that her own suitors take fitness and endurance tests. She’d weighed their balls before she’d agreed to play with them. You needed to be a determined man to rummage in her dungarees. She wanted to breed from champions.

  But, for the most part, the Mothers were content to shut the door on the outside world and play with their rag dolls and plastic rattles. They crawled about on the floor in delirious games of peek-a-boo while Baxter moved among them with her brushes and paints, splashing at her Noah’s ark mural.

  47.

  ‘What’s that?’ the Mariner said sharply.

  ‘Where?’ Charlie said, peering into the room where the Mothers were leading their toddlers in a game of primal screams.

  ‘The window!’ the Mariner said.

  Charlie looked up at the nursey window and saw nothing but the thorn hedge he had planted and a narrow glimpse of the garden beyond.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  But the Mariner grew very agitated trying to squint around the corners of Einstein’s dream. They were watching the world through the eyes of a dog and it was a keyhole view of giant babies, women s ankles and flat rubber shoes. The window was beyond Einstein’s reach.

  ‘Concentrate!' the Mariner roared impatiently, nudging the dog with the tip of an armour plated boot.

  Einstein whimpered and started to shake. He was so frightened he shook himself out of the trance.

  The Mariner cursed and lunged at Charlie, clasped him roughly by the shoulders and sent him crashing to his knees.

  ‘Concentrate!’ he roared.

  Charlie felt as if he’d been thrown against a powerful electric fence. His limbs thrashed wildly out of control and sparks popped from his crackling hair. He hit the ground with such a force that he bounced and cracked his head. He lay where he had fallen, eyes closed, fists clenched, with the world still spinning around him.

  When he finally opened his eyes he was staring at a brilliant summer sky. He could smell the sweet, sharp scent of grass and the heavy perfume of old-fashioned roses and heliotrope. For a time he didn’t move but remained where he had landed staring up at the clean and empty sky. When he turned his head he wanted to find himself stretched out on a grassy bank in a secret corner of his own garden. He wanted to find he had woken from a long and angry nightmare. He thought, in a moment, Einstein will come snuffling to find me, rasping my hand with his wet tongue; Baxter will appear from the house with a frosty jug of lemonade and she’ll sit beside me with her skirts softly fanned on the grass and we’ll be in love again because we’ll be at the moment before the moment where it all went wrong and, this time, it will be different and we won’t make the same mistakes.

  He sat up slowly and looked around. He was sitting in his own garden. It was a warm summer’s morning. To his left he saw Einstein jumping and plunging through a bed of flowers, his jaws snapping at flies. When he turned to his right he saw Einstein, again, peering at his other self from the safety of a holly bush!

  He wiped his hands across his face, frightened by the sheer intensity of this new and startling illusion. The glare of the sunlight was burning his eyes. A grasshopper crawled on his naked foot.

  ‘What happened?’ he groaned, as the Deep Time Mariner came trampling from the undergrowth.

  ‘I brought you back to the garden,’ the Mariner said cheerfully. ‘I thought you might care to show me around.’

  ‘Are we really in the past?’ Charlie whispered, pointing at the two dogs who were now sitting side by side and striking identical attitudes.

  ‘Yes,’ the Mariner said.

  ‘I don’ t like it!’ Charlie muttered. You didn’t have to be a genius to know that if you trespassed in the past you were likely to encounter yourself approaching from the shadows. And caught by your living reflection, the shock always killed you. Doppelgangered! It didn’t seem to bother Einstein, but he was a dog. It was always different for dogs.

  ‘Did you create this garden?’ the Mariner asked him.

  Charlie nodded and clambered to his feet. They were standing among the terraces he’d made when he’d cut the ornamental ponds. Beyond them a glade of flowering trees framed a view of the summer pavilion. Behind them the house was securely hidden by banks of exotic shrubbery.

  The Mariner beamed with pleasure. His green leather face seemed to darken and glow. ‘It’s a fine day,’ he said gently, sniffing the air. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

  So Charlie followed the Mariner through a maze of overblown rhododendrons with the Einsteins trotting behind them.

  48.

  Charlie had transformed the rough acres of pasture that surrounded the house into a fabulous garden. Beneath them, through a clattering curtain of tall bamboo, lay a pool of dark water where fish the colour of apricots splashed among roots of fragrant lilies. Beyond the pool an ancient Chinese funeral urn, overflowing with ivy, stood in a brilliant silver sea of rosemary, lavender, sage and thyme.

&nb
sp; This was not a manicured garden of shaved lawns, clipped hedges and neat herbaceous borders. Here was a wild and overgrown place. There were thistles wreathed in honeysuckle and deep, dusty nettle beds and creaking cabbages that stank and jostled the roots of the roses. And everywhere there were narrow paths cut through thickets of firethorn and bramble that led down to little pagan shrines, half-buried statues and curious grottoes.

  The Deep Time Mariner stalked through the garden, inspecting all its secret corners and nodding his approval at every new discovery until finally he came upon a sun-drenched clearing set in a circle of scented shrubs and sat down to rest with the Einsteins beside him.

  ‘Monkey-men were born to be gardeners,’ he said peacefully, stroking one of the little dogs, and he asked Charlie all manner of things about the garden’s design and the many plants that surrounded them.

  Charlie did his best to answer these questions although the proper names of the plants escaped him and fleabane, loosestrife and lambs’ tongue meant nothing to the Mariner. But he was thankful for this interlude in his trial, which he sensed was drawing to the wrong conclusions, and he wanted to keep the Mariner’s interest. So he tried to remember how the garden had first taken shape and what had inspired him to build it.

  It was difficult to explain. He supposed there had come a time in his life when he’d wanted to nurse the earth in his hands. It was almost as if some deep and primitive instinct had been stirred in him, some faint tribal memory that had whispered to him to stop running in circles and sit down in a quiet place to feel the planet moving beneath him.

  But what had triggered this desire? Had it been his time in Future Forecasts, designing a chicken for tomorrow where everyone would find themselves trapped in a lonely, virtual world of TV sex and shopping, that had made him relish the bone-cracking frosts and the squalls of soft, summer rain? Or had Baxter and the noise of the Mothers’ menagerie driven him to seek the solitude of the orchard and the potting shed? He didn’t know. It wasn’t important. The days belonged to the Pangloss Chicken Empire, the house belonged to Baxter, but the garden belonged to him. It was a living work of art. An original creation. And he had created it.