Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘I’m not a machine!’ Charlie complained, instinctively hiding his shame in his hands. ‘I’m just not in the mood.’

  ‘I can’t wait for you to get yourself into the mood!’ Baxter raged, scooping her breasts back into her vest. ‘Why do you have to be such a pain? l suppose you’d like me to dress up in stockings and suspenders and have my titties dipped in chocolate! Is that how you’d like it, you pathetic little pervert? Would you like to see me helpless and hog-tied in some tacky peek-a-boo thingamee? Would that do it for you? Are you some creepy little schoolboy or what?’

  ‘No!’ Charlie said indignantly. It sounded good to him but he wasn’t going to make the confession to someone who had him by the short and curlies.

  ‘I’m not your plaything you can pick up or throw down whenever you feel like it, you preening panty-sniffer!’ she shouted back at him. ‘I’m not here for your pleasure!’

  ‘No,’ Charlie said. No argument.

  ‘I’m a woman. I have to follow my natural cycles.’

  She stood up, her buttocks dimpled with rage, and walked to an empty crib in one corner of the room. It was an elaborate cage of ornately carved wood smothered in lace and pink and blue ribbons.

  Above the cage, a large hand-written chart had been pinned to the wall. This chart, carefully compiled by Baxter with the help of the Militant Mothers, represented a mysterious tide table of her own vital fluids. Each day she would study these peaks and troughs like an astrologer reading the stars. She was determined that Charlie should stand and deliver at the most auspicious moments. His reluctance to perform this simple basic duty seemed, to her, a deliberate attempt to prevent her fulfilling her destiny.

  ‘I can’t wait for you!’ she shouted, turning towards the bed. ‘Don’t you understand? Everything is critical. I've taken my temperature. I’ve checked my ovulation pattern. I’ve had a warm relaxing bath. Everything is ready but you!’ She gathered her breasts through her vest, as if checking their weight and tension, before setting them loose again.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ he insisted miserably, drawing his legs against his chest like a skeleton worked by strings. He was sulking now. What had happened to Baxter the Battling Amazon? Baxter the Slippery Slut of Sleaze? It was a long time since she’d shown any interest in him and, after such an abstinence, this clinical approach came as a rude awakening. She was cold and mechanical in his embrace. It made him feel that the operation was being performed under medical supervision. He wouldn’t have been surprised to have discovered Patch Armstrong, smelling of hospital disinfectant, waiting for him with a towel and a set of clean pyjamas.

  Desperate now to service his wife and prepared to seek any help he could find in rising to the occasion, he tried briefly to speculate on the erotic possibilities of Patch Armstrong dressed in some early Skirt Lifter fashion—a classic Ruby Keeler wig, the enormous undercarriage buckled into a Playtex™ girdle. Think of those heavy, heaving buttocks, warm as an oven, broad as the rump of a Suffolk punch. Concentrate! It won’t kill you. Patch Armstrong is dressed to thrill. But it was the last flutter of fancy from a desperate man and failed to have the desired effect.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ he concluded and reached out to pull the blanket from the floor. ‘It doesn’t feel natural.’

  ‘What’s more natural than making babies!’ Baxter screamed. She snatched up a pillow, flew at her husband in a fury and began to beat him about the head with the whirling bag of feathers.

  The Mariner was intrigued. His eyes glowed and his mouth snapped open in amazement, exposing the tip of his long black tongue. But poor Charlie, standing beside him, turned away and went to sit on the stairs. His face burned with embarrassment and his hands were shaking. The Einsteins followed him, gently arranging themselves at his feet.

  A ridiculous performance.

  51.

  ‘It never stops!’ the Mariner roared, sweeping Charlie and Einstein through the house and launching them into the sky. They flew up over the orchard, the garden shrinking away beneath them.

  Six billion mouths to feed and still they breed while the planet shrivels around them. Worms in a rotting apple. The world eaten up by a struggling, squirming ball of worms. At the end of time will they turn on themselves and devour each other? Was there no war, no famine, no pestilence to stop these creatures spreading their curse? Was there nothing to be done against them?

  The air was suddenly filled by phantoms. Charlie saw them bucking, heaving, clinging, scratching; bollock-naked wrestlers in a spiralling pillar of sexual frenzy. He saw them young, old, ugly, handsome, mad, sad and grotesquely deformed; he saw them rolling their eyes and grinding their teeth; he saw them clambering one upon another, clawing at penises, buttocks and breasts. He saw them flogging each other with canes, he saw them tormenting themselves with dildoes, he saw them shackled with ropes and chains, he saw them feasting like cannibals. He saw the sky turn black with them. He saw mothers with sons, fathers with daughters, the wretched with beasts that brayed and bellowed. He saw the voluptuous and the lascivious, the stupid and the cunning; he saw the lonely and the frightened, the violent and insane. He heard them snorting, he heard them squelching, he heard them gasping, he heard them screaming, a terrible storm of tumultuous shagging.

  ‘Enough!’ he cried. ‘Dear God, enough!’ And all at once he found himself back in his room with the dog and a giant beside him.

  ‘And was an infant born?’ the Mariner asked, glaring down at his bruised and frightened prisoner.

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘You continue to breed in the shadow of famine, while your fishing industries collapse, your grain stores dwindle to nothing, the forests are squandered for firewood and the living soil turns to dust? Your factories belch smoke. Your cities sweat fog. The water is full of poisons. The very air is venomous. What’s wrong with you, monkey-man? Are you a total goober-brain? There are millions of you living in squalor, sleeping in pipes and cardboard boxes, denied so much as a cup of clean water, scratching for crumbs in mountains of cinders. There are millions more of you gathered together, starving to death on land already stripped to sand. And still you continue! Are you beyond the laws of nature?’

  Charlie said nothing.

  He remembered Baxter, grown from a dolphin into an angry, trumpeting walrus, sitting in a hospital bed surrounded by bundles of wilting flowers. Baxter with her books of names and paperback guides to the best in child psychology.

  At first Patch Armstrong had tried to persuade her to give delivery in the kitchen, squatting in a birthing pool of herbal infusions while the Mothers sang songs of encouragement and shot the event on video.

  ‘The most important, beautiful, primal, sacred moment in your entire womanhood shot in living colour with stereo sound and presented in a special souvenir box!’ Patch the Mother Superior bragged when she’d tried to sell the idea to a more than reluctant Baxter.

  The new Mother shuddered. It was going to be hard enough without inviting a camera crew to crowd between her legs. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t sound very hygienic.’

  Patch ignored her reservations. ‘It’s absolutely awesome!’ she crowed. It’s like having eyes in your arse.’

  ‘Don’t you think we should have somebody here with some sort of medical qualification?’ Baxter said. 'I might need some help.’

  ‘Why?’ Patch said. ‘It’s so simple—just follow the laws of gravity.’

  ‘But it’s my first time,’ Baxter said. ‘I’m afraid there’ll be complications.’ Breach birth! Caesarean section! Blood on the walls! Bowels on the carpet!

  ‘We’ll help you,’ Patch said. ‘We’re Mothers. We’ll make it something you won’t forget and when we’ve taken delivery we’ll cook and eat the placenta.’

  Baxter wasn’t convinced that she wanted to be a part of this jungle jamboree but she didn’t know how to tell the group. She knew she would die if she had to give birth in their stupid, inflatable rubber bath, but she didn’t want to d
isappoint them. They’d already bought the scented candles.

  She needn’t have worried. When Ambrose heard of the pregnancy he’d lost no time in making reservations at the most expensive maternity hospital he could find in London. A private suite with closed circuit TV. Carpets on the walls and whirlpool bath. French and Chinese meals on a tray. Make-up and beauty consultants. The works. Baxter, for once in her life, didn’t bother to argue with him.

  Ambrose loved children. They were an investment for the future. Every child born in this wonderful world was an extra mouth to feed and a chance to enhance the profit margins. He was already hatching a scheme to send every new mother in the country a personal greetings card containing a wishbone from a Pangloss chicken.

  The child had been born at two o’clock in the morning. Baxter had screamed and struggled and bitten the nurses. She abandoned her breathing exercises and her seven rules of relaxation. She cursed Charlie and God and the Militant Mothers. It was horrible. She hated it. She felt she was passing a pineapple gift-wrapped in razor wire.

  Charlie had not been invited to watch the delivery.

  ‘You’ve had your moment of glory, sailor,’ Baxter had told him in the cab on the way to the hospital. ‘I’m not having you stand and gloat while they turn me inside out.’

  When he was finally summoned to her bed she had already given birth. He found her in a drugged sleep and the infant connected to a life support machine in the Peter Pan & Wendy Intensive Care Ward™.

  A nurse with thick ankles and soft canvas shoes had helped him into a cotton gown and taken him into the ward. She looked too young to be in charge of anything more challenging than a Burpie™ doll. She looked like she should have been at school. There were angry love bites on her neck and braces on her teeth. A gold bead gleamed on the side of her nose, her own reward for a recently pierced nostril. The bead shone like a small, ripe cyst. She had nothing to say to him. She led him through a maze of machines, her shoes making little sucking sounds against the floor.

  Charlie stared around at the hundreds of incubators, the oxygen lines and monitors. It was like a Pangloss battery house. They were factory farming babies. In the Peter Pan & Wendy Fattening Unit the tiny inmates had climate control, soft lights, automatic feed, everything they needed to cling to life and grow to the perfect size and weight.

  ‘Congratulations,’ the nurse said, stopping beside an incubator and gesturing at the contents. They stared down at a roll of bandages, plugged into the parent machine by a clutch of brightly coloured tubes. Beneath a transparent oxygen mask glowered a face like a poisonous walnut.

  ‘What is it?’ Charlie whispered.

  ‘It’s a baby,’ the nurse said, although she seemed to have her doubts.

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘It’s a girl,’ the nurse said, checking a plastic clipboard that hung beside the machine.

  ‘Is it normal?’ he asked nervously. The child looked so frail that he almost expected to see the Dead & Alive Man come creeping along the rows of machines, swinging his heavy rubber bucket.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the young nurse said, glancing quickly at the monitors. She frowned. She checked heartbeat, ventilation and heat; colour, movement and weight; fluids, gases and solids. Everything seemed to be under control.

  ‘It was early,’ Charlie explained.

  ‘That’s why we keep them in these cookers,’ the nurse said, smiling and showing her dentalwork.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ the nurse said with a happy shrug. ‘I think it’s all part of the Golden Delivery Service™. You paid for it. Why don’t you check in the brochure? I don’t usually work this ward.’ Her face grew vacant. She had exhausted her knowledge of the subject. She walked away on her softly sucking shoes.

  Charlie sat by the incubator, smiled down at the child and waited for the surge of fatherly love that he knew should overwhelm him. He knew that he should love the child, that it was natural and right to love children. The house was already filled by letters of congratulations from baby food and toddlers’ fashion-wear manufacturers, illustrated catalogues of educational toys and nursery furniture, free samples of powdered milk, rusks, stewed fruit, rubber teats, soap, shampoo and dusting powder. Babies were shown on TV shows as adorable household pets. They featured in advertising for detergents and disinfectants and malted chocolate sandwich spreads. Their wit and wisdom was a regular feature of women’s magazines. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Aren’t they cute—the things they say! Children were born to inherit the Earth. They would be the guardians of its smogs and its oil slicks and nuclear dumps. Especially its nuclear dumps. They would have dominion over the barren sea, and over the foul air, and over the skeleton forests and over all the Earth, and over every creeping things that creepeth upon the Earth. Yea, even unto the plastic airline tray and the wire coat hanger and the indestructible sock and all the other treasures of Man. One day, my child, all this will be yours.

  He should have felt proud, he should have felt small in the sight of God, he should have hoped that this half-cooked meat pudding would bring salvation to a desperate world. He should have felt sentimental, foolish, astonished, immortal. He should have gone out to make himself drunk, wandered the streets, harpooned the mouths of gawking strangers with giant Havana cigars.

  After a few minutes the nurse returned, hurried towards him and hooked his hand to the crook of her arm. ‘Wrong baby,’ she said impatiently as she moved him to another incubator. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ she muttered, checking the new clipboard. ‘This time it’s a boy ‘

  He was staring down at an identical infant in an identical machine. He couldn’t tell the difference. These new visitors to the planet all looked the same to him. Beneath the gauze and bandages, beneath the clusters of pipes and tubing, they reminded Charlie of processed chickens.

  It was five o’clock in the morning. He felt tired and confused and lonely. He stood up to stretch himself and wandered aimlessly through the long rows of incubators. The monitors chirruped softly as he passed, blinking their green and orange eyes. He turned right and then left and quickly managed to get himself lost. He tried to retrace his steps but it was hopeless. His child was hidden in the maze.

  He reached the main doors and went in search of the nurse but beyond the Peter Pan & Wendy Intensive Care Ward™ the corridors were empty. He found a flight of stairs and followed them down, through the deserted kitchens and past the locked dispensary, until he found himself out on the street.

  It was raining. He pulled off the cotton gown, cast it aside and stole away, into the cold embrace of dawn.

  52.

  Later that day Charlie took himself to the office and was immediately summoned into the presence of the mighty Ambrose Pangloss. He found the tycoon, positively pink with pleasure, behind the mahogany slabs of his desk.

  ‘Congratulations, Charlie!’ Ambrose beamed, waving him into a chair. ‘I phoned the hospital before breakfast. It’s wonderful news. You must be pleased. No complications. Mother and baby doing well. If there’s anything you need I hope you won’t be afraid to ask me. This will mean some big changes in your life.’

  ‘I think Baxter has everything under control,’ Charlie said. He sat down and placed his Senior Statesman™ plastic attaché case on his knees. He smiled. His eyes glowed unusually bright. His damp suit was giving out a sinister smell. He needed a shave and a fresh shirt.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Ambrose smiled. ‘Women instinctively understand babies. It’s their natural condition. And do you know how many babies are born every day, Charlie?’

  ‘No.’ Charlie said.

  ‘250,000,’ Ambrose said. ‘Imagine! That’s a hundred and seventy something a minute. Every minute of every day. That’s more than two a second. Why, that’s faster than you can count ’em. Yes! It’s all here in these population reports,’ he said, tapping his fingernails against a bulgi
ng yellow folder on the desk. ‘Millions of babies every week. A couple of dozen since we’ve been talking!’

  Charlie said nothing.

  ‘And they all need to eat,’ Ambrose said gleefully. ‘I’ve been told that in the next ten years there’ll be sixty-four countries around the world with populations too large to feed. But I want you to keep that to yourself, Charlie. We need to keep the competitive edge. This is the biggest marketing opportunity in the history of mankind!’

  ‘No doubt about it,’ Charlie said without listening. He stifled a yawn by scratching the stubble on his chin. He was so tired that his smallest movements felt exaggerated, as if he were no longer secured by the laws of gravity and might float away, if pushed from his chair, with his feet never touching the ground.

  ‘But what are we going to do about it?’ Ambrose inquired, leaning forward confidentially and beaming at Charlie.

  ‘We’re going into baby foods?’ Charlie suggested. You didn’t need to be a genius to know what Ambrose Pangloss was thinking. He was always thinking of chicken.

  ‘Baby foods!’ Ambrose said triumphantly. ‘It’s the future, believe me. People make people. It’s a growth industry.’ He paused. A growth industry. That was a good one. He liked that. He must remember to write it down. He could use it in one of his speeches. ‘The more babies there are in the world the better for everyone. We need expanding markets. But we’ve got to catch them young. Always remember, Charlie, that people no longer have lives—they only have life styles and life styles are dependent on a vigorous branding approach. Think about it. Drop everything else. Think about bottled baby foods. Chicken soup. Chicken broth. Chicken paste. Chicken spread. Cradle to grave, Charlie. Cradle to grave.’

  Charlie left the green silk office and made his way down to the Future Forecasts department. It was ten thirty. Lorraine the receptionist glanced up at him from the pages of Chit-Chat Monthly, crossed her legs, frowned and consulted her watch.

  Everyone else ignored him. The second forecaster was kneeling before the coffee machine with his hand up the sugar dispenser. The rest of them skulked in their cubicles.