Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  Charlie walked into his own cubicle and sat down. Then he placed his attaché case on the desk, snapped open the locks and removed a hammer. It was a big claw hammer, with a red handle and a polished steel head. He held the weapon in his fist and smiled. It had taken him a long time to reach this exquisite moment of madness, but we boil at different degrees and Charlie had reached his boiling point.

  His heart fluttered. The fatigue he had felt pressing down on him seemed to lift away to reveal a curious sense of elation. There was no rage. He felt happy and excited. The hammer would speak for him.

  The telephone rang. The noise took him by surprise. He raised the hammer and hacked at the phone, spilling the handpiece from the cradle. He chopped at the flex and splintered the brittle plastic shell, sweeping the debris to the floor. That was a new way to answer the phone. And then nothing could stop him. He slashed at the wire trays, the appointments diary, the coffee mug filled with ballpoint pens and the multi-functional calculator.

  He stood up to confront the glaring computer screen. It was running the new Pangloss screensaver: a line of pecking chookies that jerked across the screen like ducks in a shooting gallery. He turned sideways and swung the hammer like a pendulum, using the force of his own weight to take down the line of chickens. The monitor shattered in a fury of smoke and sparks. He twisted around and hammered at the frosted glass walls of his cell. The walls exploded, showering him in brilliant hailstones. He swung the hammer in circles over his head, bringing down the rest of the glass and chopping at the wooden frame.

  When Charlie opened his eyes, the cubicle had disappeared. He had cut himself loose. He stepped from the wreckage and looked around the empty department. There was silence. The other forecasters crouched, without breathing, beneath the shelter of their desks.

  Charlie returned the hammer to his Senior Statesman™ and strolled from the building. He went home to work in his garden.

  53.

  The child was called Victor. As soon as he’d grown fat enough he was disconnected from his incubator and Baxter was permitted to take him home. The Militant Mothers were waiting in the nursery, which they’d hung with coloured ribbons and bunting, to hold a peanut butter party in celebration of the great event.

  Charlie had been asked to attend the party—for half an hour’s ritual humiliation or perhaps to witness some small point in law that confirmed or confounded his rights as a father—he couldn’t guess why they’d called him. He arrived with a bunch of freshly cut flowers but it hadn’t been such a good idea. When he’d entered the nursery one of the Mothers started sneezing and another had an asthma attack

  ‘Oh, look!’ Patch Armstrong said archly. ‘How sad. He’s cut some flowers. I suppose he wants us to put them in water and watch while the poor things die. I think it’s a crime to cut them down before they’ve had a chance to seed.’

  Charlie stood with the bundle of flowers swinging loose in his fist and made several rapid calculations involving the target of Patch Armstrong’s mouth, distance of strike and velocity. She sensed the threat and knocked him dead with a look she usually reserved for children who wilfully wet themselves.

  ‘I can’t breathe!’ one of the Mothers gasped. ‘Don’t let him bring them in here!’ She clutched at her throat and collapsed in a twitching heap of cotton. Her face turned a nasty shade of blue. She was squeezing out little strangled groans. Several of the Mothers ran forward and tried to calm her down by clucking and fanning her with their hands.

  ‘Do something quickly!’ someone shouted. ‘This sort of thing is bad for the children.’

  ‘Charlie!’ Baxter shouted, from the other side of the room. ‘Why do you have to be such a pain? Take all that rubbish away.’

  ‘I cut them for you.’

  ‘I saw enough flowers in hospital,’ Baxter said. ‘This isn’t a blasted funeral parlour. What’s wrong with you, Charlie? Why do you always have to be the centre of attention?’

  So Charlie retired in disgrace and returned, without bearing gifts, to sit on a painted wooden stool while twenty curious infants came and smeared him with peanut butter. They sat on his shoes and dragged at his sleeves and tried to pull out his jacket pockets. One of their number, a little girl with a snot-plugged nose, managed to clamber aboard his knees and gave his ear a poke with a pencil.

  Charlie clenched his teeth against the sudden jolt of pain and grinned at the child. He pulled the pencil from her grasp and snapped it into fragments, silently stuffing the splinters down the front of her Donald Duck™ vest. The child was horrified. She had been leading a charmed life. She had never encountered opposition. She couldn’t believe it. She was outraged. She burst into tears and scampered back to her mother.

  It was the first time that Charlie had been allowed into the nursery. He felt like a man who had blundered by chance into a women’s changing room. Everywhere he turned he saw heavy, half-dressed women crawling around on their hands and knees. One of the Mothers was sorting through a box of plastic bricks, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her skirt bunched high around her thighs. She paused to stroke her knee, feeling the warmth of the sun through the window.

  Another Mother, with a short ponytail and wire-rimmed spectacles, was playing a game of peek-a-boo in white cotton underwear. She had perky breasts and a slight paunch, a stubborn cushion of fat pushed from the waist band of her pants.

  Charlie cast furtive glances in every direction. His own computer software had been designed to make him focus on every sound and shape that might approximate a woman. He’d been programmed to twitch at every signal. Whenever he came within range of the target, the light in his brain would flash the button was pressed and be blinked firing the voyeur’s unloaded camera. He resented this automatic reflex, the relentless search for titillation, almost as much as the objects of his attention, these plump erotophobic creatures, despised him or it. He knew it was madness. But the programme was running. He didn’t know how to cancel it. And Charlie had been taken by surprise, he hadn’t been prepared for this lazy exhibition of unbuckled women. He felt hot and wretched as the blood was stirred in him. He was in enough trouble without looking for it.

  One of the Mothers caught his eye and he quickly checked himself, concentrating his mind by counting the bars on the climbing frame. An animal mural filled the walls with elephants in striped pyjamas and pigs wearing pork pie hats. The floor was covered in chewed cushions, towels and rubber sheets.

  Finally Baxter came forward with a blanket bundle in her arms. She was dressed to look young and radiant. Baxter the Suffering Madonna. Baxter the Innocent. She was wearing a long white night-gown—in contrast to the other women who seemed happy to play in their underwear—with full sleeves and a high buttoned neck. Her hair had been gathered into a pigtail draped neatly between her shoulderblades. She unwrapped the blanket and introduced Victor to his father.

  The child gurgled and tried to put its foot in its mouth. It didn’t look too bad now that the wrinkles had disappeared and its head had a halo of fine white hair.

  ‘Say something,’ Baxter prompted. ‘This is your son. Isn’t there something you want to say?’

  ‘Hello,’ Charlie said, leaning forward and peering into Baxter’s perfumed arms. He was sharply aware that he’d just been replaced in the grand scheme of things. Here was the child who had come to bury him. This was the fruit of his own brief season. Here was winter’s messenger to wither the hope and promise of a summer he had neglected to taste. They were closing the turnpikes. They were locking the windows and doors. His dreams of adventure were finished. He had lost his moment. He felt the nausea rise in his throat. What had gone wrong? He had everything he could desire. He was, as everyone liked to tell him, a very lucky man.

  ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Patch Armstrong said. The rest of the Mothers fell silent. The children stopped crawling and bawling. Everyone looked expectantly at Charlie as if he were about to shout Surprise and shower them all with gifts.

  ‘No, C
harlie said

  ‘Isn’t there something you want to say to Baxter?’ Patch said, folding her arms against her chest and tapping her foot in a pantomime of impatience.

  ‘What?’ Charlie said, hauling himself from the painted stool and spilling crumbs from his clothes.

  ‘Thank you!’ a chorus of Mothers shouted.

  54.

  There’s no doubt that, given time, Charlie would have learned to love this child. And he might have settled down with Baxter who, given time, would fall in love with him again, in a more mature and gentle fashion, having finally convinced herself that all his personal agony stemmed from the day when he saw his mother flying through an open bedroom window. And they would become a happier and wiser couple, content to devote their lives to Victor the surgeon and concert pianist and gracefully growing old together beneath the hollyhocks. And Ambrose Pangloss would find God, given time, and use all his money and influence to establish homes for waifs and strays and persuade Patch Armstrong (who would find and marry Harry Prampolini) to run the homes with the Militant Mothers, and everybody would walk, hand in hand, happy and exhausted smelling of attar of violets, into the final pages of one of those Katy Pphart novels that Mrs Flodden used to read to young Einstein. Anything could happen, given time.

  But this is a story about the end of time.

  55.

  Charlie went back to the summerhouse. He didn’t want to stay in the house—the Mothers complained that the sight of him curdled their milk.

  At nine-twenty the following morning the Pangloss Mercedes broke a path through the undergrowth and delivered the chicken slaughterer to the house. Ambrose inspected the grandchild, approved Baxter’s choice of women friends and bestowed his blessings upon them.

  He didn’t enquire after Charlie since he thought his son-in-law was at large in the farthest outposts of empire, working on bottled baby foods. Baxter, if she gave it a thought, knew that Charlie’s golden feather allowed him the freedom to work as he pleased. They both believed that Charlie was a long way from the house. And Charlie, watching the limousine from the safety of the wooden pavilion, wasn’t going to argue with them.

  Ambrose hadn’t heard the rumours from Regional Accounts that Charlie had taken an axe into Future Forecasts and threatened to butcher his colleagues. There were whispers, in Global Marketing, that Charlie had murdered someone and drowned himself in the river; but the police were not informed because the company feared a scandal. The stories spread from floor to floor but Ambrose Pangloss heard nothing. He was too important to be troubled with gossip.

  That same night a maintenance crew had been called to rebuild the cubicle and fit a new desk and telephone. The next day a wire tray and a red ballpoint pen appeared on the desk and by the end of the week it looked as if nothing had changed.

  ‘You should clear this jungle,’ Ambrose complained, nodding towards the orchard and the rhododendron grove. ‘You’ve let it grow wild. I don’t know what’s happened to the place. It’s a shame. There’s nowhere to park the car anymore.’

  ‘It’s Charlie,’ Baxter said. ‘It’s just another of his crazy schemes. One moment he thinks he’s Gauguin and the next he’s pretending to be Kate Ability Brown.’

  ‘It’s a mess,’ Ambrose said. ‘Why don’t you let me send someone down to clear it out.’

  Baxter smiled sweetly and squeezed his arm. ‘You’re such a big sweetheart,’ she crooned. ‘We really want a proper playground for the sake of the children.’

  ‘It’s natural,’ Ambrose said. He liked the idea of Baxter as mother. She looked so serene in her pretty smock and neat little plastic sandals. A complete woman. ‘They need fresh air and sunshine at that age,’ he said cheerfully. 'When you were small you played in the garden for hours. Do you remember?’

  ‘But we can’t let the poor liddle things out there… ’ Baxter prompted, pouting and looking forlorn.

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ Ambrose agreed. ‘They could eat something and poison themselves. They could fall in the water and drown. I’m surprised that Charlie allowed this to happen, It’s very careless of him. You need a big lawn and a sandpit—children always love sandpits—and a few swings and a climbing frame.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Baxter said doubtfully. ‘You find doggie-doodles in the grass and horrid nasty spiders and worms and all sorts of horrible creepy-crawlies that iddy-biddy babies might put in their liddle mouths.’

  ‘Well, what do you suggest?’

  Baxter hesitated. She chewed her lower lip and gazed thoughtfully out towards the firethorn thicket. ‘We could pave it,’ she said at last.

  ‘That’s drastic,’ Ambrose said. He’d been thinking of elegant English lawn, croquet hoops and a barbecue corner.

  ‘If we paved it we could hose it down every day with lots of nice hot soapy water and then we’d always know that it was clean enough for the eeny-weenies,’ Baxter said. ‘And you’d always have somewhere to park the car,’ she added, pinching his arm.

  ‘It makes sense,’ Ambrose nodded. You had to make sacrifices for children and it wouldn’t do any harm to have somewhere to park the Mercedes.

  ‘But I can’t wait for Charlie to do it,’ Baxter said flatly.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Ambrose said. ‘I’ll organise something for you as soon as I get back to the office.’

  Baxter smiled and pecked his ear.

  Charlie, of course, could hear nothing of this conversation. When the limousine had driven away he crept from the summerhouse, collected Einstein and went back to work in the cabbage patch.

  56.

  The demolition began while Charlie was out near the south grotto, clearing ground for his poultry house. He’d settled on a favourite variety of cross bred pullet and was planning to let the birds run loose in the orchard, so he’d need nothing more elaborate than a night roosting ark with nest-boxes, feeders and drinkers. When the birds were settled they’d soon be earning their keep in eggs. He could use their old bedding for compost. If the poultry proved a success he might consider making a beehive. Raw honey and wax for candles. Anything seemed possible.

  It was a bright, crisp morning. There were cowslips showing in the long grass. The apple trees were shedding their blossom like canopies of melting snow. When he heard the sound of the engine he stopped work, turned and looked at Einstein. The dog was standing on a grass bank, his ears cocked and his muzzle trawling the air.

  ‘What is it?’ Charlie said.

  The little dog growled and stamped his feet. He looked anxious. He could smell diesel fumes. He could sense trouble. The ground beneath him seemed to vibrate.

  Before Charlie could speak again there was a terrible crashing of undergrowth, a jangle of chains and a plume of oily black smoke drifted across the tops of the trees.

  He picked up his spade and ran through the garden with Einstein hard on his heels. They slithered down ditches and scrambled up rockeries, chasing the line of the wall towards the wrought iron gates. They came charging through the shrubbery and then stopped to stare in horror.

  A dirty yellow bulldozer, slashing a hole through a holly hedge, was uprooting a small magnolia tree, smashing the earth around it like pie crust.

  ‘Get away!’ Charlie shouted, stumbling forward into the path of the great machine. ‘Get out of here, you crazy bastard!’ He waved his arms, swinging the spade above his head like a frenzied samurai swordsman.

  ‘What a fugging mess!’ the driver shouted back at him from the window of his cab. He was a little stump of a man with a square head and a mouthful of broken teeth. He switched off the engine and scowled down at Charlie.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Charlie shouted. He fell to his knees and nursed the tree in his hands. The trunk had been twisted, the few flowers shattered like luminous fragments of porcelain, the roots exposed among the great sods of upturned soil.

  ‘Are you the fugging gardener in this fugging place? It’s fugging diabolical. It’s going to take me hours to root out this fugging m
ess. This machine is too fugging small for the fugging job, that’s the fugging problem. You need fugging dynamite for this fugging job. No fugger bothers to tell me nothing.’

  The noise of the bulldozer brought Baxter and some of the Mothers marching from the house. They gathered, a little distance away, and shouted encouragements to the driver.

  ‘Morning, ladies!’ he beamed. He couldn’t believe his luck. A house full of fugging women. He looked them over, stripped them down, and made little clicking sounds with his tongue. He liked the one with the big gut and the mane of curly hair.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Baxter shouted. ‘Why have you stopped the engine?’

  ‘Are you the governor?’ he called down to Baxter. He wasn’t going to make a move without a nod from the governor. The turnip-head with the spade looked like a fugging lunatic.

  ‘Yes,’ Baxter told him.

  The driver winked and grinned at her breasts.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ Charlie demanded, trying to choke back his anger. He stood up and turned to his wife. He was covered in mud and leaves. ‘Is this your idea?’

  ‘Daddy wants the place cleaned out,’ Baxter said, moving slowly back through a strawberry bed.

  ‘But this is my garden! It’s mine!’ Charlie shouted. ‘It’s beautiful. You can’t touch it.’

  ‘Leave her alone!’ the driver shouted. He didn’t want a fugging lunatic spoiling everything. They ought to keep him chained to his bed. A house full of fugging women. This was his lucky fugging day.

  ‘Shut up, Charlie!’ Baxter snapped. ‘It’s not a garden. It’s a filthy overgrown wasteland. Look at it! God knows what’s lurking out there in the weeds. And it’s not healthy for Victor and the rest of the children to have all these pools of stagnant water around the house.’