Quietly, to avoid causing panic among the people of Alibia, who valued stability above all things, Toyk made a cursory examination of the surrounding blocks. He discovered that several other buildings had wandered away from their official locations. First thing Monday, he decided, he would make a report to his superiors and seek permission to broaden his investigations.
*
The Members of the Society soldiered on, with the silence of the City Fathers ringing in their ears. They were all past exhaustion. But whereas some were ready to submit, others were determined to go on to the end, no matter the sacrifice. Factions arose. The meetings at the Café Europa, which had been called to discuss strategy, but which always ended in stalemate, grew more and more fractious.Voices were raised and threats levelled. Then one evening, pencils were pointed in anger for the first time in the Society’s history, and the meeting broke up in disorder.
In the small hours of that bitter morning, Fluxman stood sleepless at the window of his penthouse, looking down on Alibia. Tutivillus Heights was the city’s only skyscraper – in Alibia, the top of a six-storey block will brush the brow of heaven – and it made him feel immensely alert and far-seeing, and utterly detached from the earth. His eyes wandered from rooftop to rooftop, from street to street. He felt it. The building was swaying, a motion so gentle it would have escaped the notice of all but the most perceptive observer. It was not soothing at all; it filled him with foreboding. Then he recalled who he was and what he stood for. He erased his frowning misgivings from the glass before him with an eraser shaped like an egg, but they came back again and again.
*
Toyk’s report was an eye-opener. There was movement everywhere, not just in the outlying industrial zones, but in the heart of Alibia. The signs pointed to massive geological instability. Nothing would stay put. Structures were shifting closer together or further apart, skylines were rising and falling, streets were narrowing, views were opening up, cracks were appearing.
Most puzzling, he reported, was the fact that some of these changes would later reverse themselves, just as mysteriously, as if a countervailing force were at work. One of his own juniors, a certain Bron, was on hand when two houses in Capitol Hill, the most sought-after of the hillside suburbs, having moved slowly but surely closer together for several weeks, suddenly sprang back to their original positions. The deviation, a matter of inches, had been perceptible only with measuring instruments, but the correction was so abrupt, it was visible even to an untrained eye.
A stitch in time saves nine. But it is the lot of ordinary people that they are seldom aware of the loose threads in the seams of their own lives. And a missing button, as they say in Alibia, leads to a lost coat. Months went by, and the citizens remained blind to the changes taking place around them. Then, at last, the observant ones began to notice the more violent reversals. Some of them, like the occupants of the houses in Capitol Hill, whose crockery had been rattled until it broke, put it down to earth tremors; others were inclined to speculate. Before Toyk had time to complete his investigation, there were letters to the Star suggesting that such upsets were symptomatic of chronic instability in the body politic, claims the City Fathers always denied.
Behind the scenes, Toyk’s report caused a furore. Even as they were pronouncing the whole region as safe as houses, the Fathers were issuing urgent instructions to Public Works to begin with repairs immediately. Soon the streets were filled with teams of men in orange overalls performing highly visible and ineffectual shoring-up operations – securing cables to walls, hammering posts into pavements, building retaining walls and dykes, digging trenches, sinking boreholes, grounding flying buttresses, pouring road metal into fissures.
These busy efforts had no effect. On any day of the week, in any close or wynd, one might see someone trip over a step where no step had been before, or pause to gaze anxiously into the black space that had opened up between a newly built wall and a newly grouted pavement. All it took was for the street signs to make one quarter of a turn, anticlockwise, and the city would be clogged with people who had lost their way.
*
Night after night, a shudder of restless fidgeting passed through the city. Everything that opened and shut was doing so, secretively and obsessively. Windows and doors, posts and rails, tongues and grooves, stocks and mitres were testing the bounds of their unions, engaging and disengaging, clasping and releasing, over and over, as if they meant to part company soon. Those who were awake to this experimental dissent shivered, and imagined that someone had walked over their graves.
*
The Proofreaders, persevering in wounded silence, were not spared the trials that befell ordinary Alibians. Figg was inserting some new arrivals into the Register of Births and Deaths one morning – it was supposed to be his day off, but he was slaving away as usual – when the threads that secured the bone-yellow buttons of his cuffs unravelled with a fizz, as if he had held a flame to them, and fell away. He gazed in consternation at the squiggles of black thread on his sleeves and the flakes of ash on the backs of his hands.
He turned his eye again to the page before him. ‘Knowing you enriched our lives’ Good Lord! There was something wrong with the paper. It seemed strangely pale, it was floating, curling up at the edges and drifting free of the desk. ‘Safe in God’s care’ And then he saw what the problem was: there was not a single full stop left anywhere. He paged backwards and forwards. Nothing. The leaves levitated, the edges feathered into deckle. The whole stack fluttered and began to reshuffle itself, as Figg hastily rolled up his sleeves. Then he pinned the concertinaed sheaf to the desk with one hand and took up his blue pencil with the other. He worked with feverish concentration until night fell, buttoning down line after line … caret, caret, caret … until he could hardly see straight.
In the end, he looked at his fist, lying like a leaden paperweight on the stack, and at the crumbled end of his pencil. He licked the dent in his forefinger and flipped through the pages. Twenty or thirty of them, newly buttoned, lay neatly on the desk … the rest mounted obstinately upwards. He checked the clock: he had not risen for more than seven hours. To save a minute, he had gone so far – God help him! – as to pass water in the waste-paper basket. But it was no good. Even as he calculated the extent of his commitment, the corners of the page under his fist, the page he had just finished correcting, twitched and curled into dog-ears. Exhausted, he fell back in his chair and watched the papers rising slowly into the air, gathering under the ceiling like cumulus, blown this way and that in the breeze from the fan, scudding against the mouldy cornices, sinking down in the four corners of the room. Enough was enough. He reached for the telephone.
‘This is the residence of Aubrey Fluxman,’ the machine began. ‘Should you wish to leave a message …’
*
Fluxman had also been working that morning, banging away at the typewriter, when the lenses of his spectacles began to vibrate. He knew at once that something catastrophic was afoot. He listened to the first breathless accounts of the unfolding drama on the radio while he tweezered a screw from among the hammers. Then he slipped into a serviceable tracksuit, with an elasticized waistband, and went out into the streets.
The fruits of that convulsive instant lay scattered everywhere. The riverside coffee bars and eateries stood empty. In the shadowy interior of the Hottentot, which he had frequented in his youth, a leather banquette coughed. He crept in to take samples, hooking red and brown buttons from their resting places with the end of his pencil. He ventured into the furniture factory as well, despite the warnings of the security guards, to see with his own eyes the dowelled dead in the basement, sprawled among scatter cushions as fat as puffer fish, looking for all the world as if they had merely lain down to rest. In the Gravy Boat, it was business as usual. Just hours before, the regular morning sprinkling of tea-sippers and French-knitters had rushed away in a panic when the armchairs inflated beneath them. But the proprietor was treating it all with the levity
appropriate to a minor mishap. Half-price for standing room only, snacks on the house. Finding a pillar to lean against, Fluxman ate a Croque Monsieur and drank a beer, which he normally denied himself in the daylight hours. Later, he simply wandered through the unnaturally rounded afternoon, mourning every vanished quilt and pucker in the urban upholstery.
Although it was early, many businesses had closed their doors, and the streets were filling with people on their way home from work, clerks and secretaries stepping warily from the lobbies of office buildings, blinking into the light like people after a matinée at the cinema. The gondolas were packed with more than the usual quota of tourists and touts, the carriages of the funiculars were bursting. Everywhere he saw the same bewildered expressions, the same pursed lips, which might be suppressing laughter or tears, the same downcast eyes, as if people were hunting for fallen change in the cracks of the pavements. They hurried by or stood whispering furtively on street corners, avoiding one another’s eyes, clutching handfuls of their own clothing. Fluxman moved among them, wide-eyed, gazing at bare flesh between yawning lapels, coats held together with paper clips, safety-pinned cuffs and stapled shirt-fronts. On a corner near the station, a businessman was plucking the rubber-banded toggles of his duffel coat, and Fluxman, stooping to gather more samples, listened to that elastic adagio as if he had never heard music before.
Arriving home in the early hours, he let his answering machine stammer out its messages. Please to call Figg. Enough is enough: a meeting of the Society is in order. Then the worried voice of Munnery: Figg suggests a meeting. What do you think? Then Levitas, who hated speaking on the telephone. Munnery had called him too, and Wiederkehr, and Banes. Then Figg again, sounding drunk. The whole Society was in an uproar.
*
It became clear at last to the most faithful Members of the Society, standing by with their bundles of pencils, that the call for help from the City Fathers would never come. It was a bitter pill, but it had to be swallowed.
An extraordinary meeting of the Society was convened at short notice on the night after the great unfastening. They gathered at the Café Europa as usual, and although some semblance of calm had returned to the city after the disturbances of the previous day, each had a story to tell about the hazards he had faced just making his way through the streets to their rendezvous.
Wiederkehr had almost plunged into a crevasse that had opened up in the cobbles at his feet as he crossed St Cloud’s Square.
‘It may have been an unguarded excavation,’ Fluxman ventured to say. ‘You know how the procurers are always stealing the red lanterns.’
‘It was a dry dock,’ Wiederkehr said tetchily. ‘It gaped as suddenly as speaking. One moment there was solid earth beneath my bluchers, the next a black hole as big as ten swimming baths, with a catamaran lying in the deep end.’
‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I nearly broke my neck too,’ said Munnery. ‘Fell over a tombstone in the High Street. I transposed it at once with a mossy bench from the boneyard, but the damage had already been done.’ He showed them the torn knees of his suit.
Fluxman noticed, as he examined his friend’s frayed tweed, that his trousers were tied up with a length of typewriter ribbon, but he said nothing. Munnery had brought a bulging portfolio of maps with him, and while they spoke, he was readjusting the highways and byways with his blue pencil, and keeping an eye on the more irresponsible rezonings.
‘If the Fathers will not come to us, we must go to them,’ Fluxman said when it was his turn to speak. ‘We must do our duty for Alibia.’
‘About time,’ said Figg. ‘What shall we say?’
‘The simple truth: stop putting the cart before the horse. Take care of the paperwork, and the world will take care of itself.’
‘But who will believe it?’ said Banes.
As if to support his point, the first municipal reupholstery squad burst in through the batwing doors, clutching lumpy pouches full of leather-covered buttons, and waving bodkins as long as pencils. They fell to with a vengeance. Most of the patrons fled. But the Members would not budge, on principle, and boldly continued with their meeting. For their pains, Munnery got the sleeve of his jacket stitched to the arm of his chair, and might have spent the night there, had Wiederkehr not slashed him loose with a swift pass of his 2B.
*
Naturally, it fell to Fluxman to lead the delegation that went to discuss the problem of declining standards with the City Fathers.
A special audience was held in the oak-panelled council chamber. Fluxman presented their case. He showed how the seeds of decline had been sown in mischief and trivialities. He pointed to instances of looming chaos, like the great unfastening, and cited statistics on damage to property, loss of life and limb, and low levels of investor confidence. He painted a gloomy picture of a future in which everything was out of order, and nothing ran smoothly to a creditable conclusion.
‘If appropriate measures to secure law and order are not taken soon,’ he concluded, ‘it will be too late. Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured.’
The last echoes of Fluxman’s baritone clattered away in the rafters. There was a pause, and then, not the ‘Bravos’ and ‘Hear hears’ that would have done justice to his oration, not the grateful applause and relieved chatter, but catcalls and whistles from the peanut gallery. The City Fathers, perched like children on the bloated leather seats of the dock, with the toes of their shoes scraping the floorboards, looked down unperturbed.
‘We have teams at work this minute repairing the damage that has been reported, all of it slight,’ said Councillor Lumley, the father figure of refrigerator services. ‘Routine maintenance goes on apace. Everything is under control.’
In the back benches, a team of upholsterers clad in their characteristic leatherette dungarees and cotton T-shirts were reattaching buttons. Hearing themselves mentioned from the platform, they raised a ragged cheer.
‘All the maintenance in the world will be of no use,’ said Fluxman. ‘We need to look to our records.’
‘Nonsense! What good would that do?’
Distasteful as it was, smacking as it did of the party trick, Munnery called for a seating plan, which the Speaker duly produced, and demonstrated the point the Society was trying to make by transposing a few desks, councillors and all. Levitas realigned the chandeliers and shifted a rose window in the west wall to admit the setting sun. But rather than impressing upon the Fathers the seriousness of the situation, this made them think it was all just a game. They wanted Munnery to alley-oop them, like so many children, they wanted their desks rearranged so that they could be closer to the cafeteria or the cloakroom.
When Levitas dumped Lumley unceremoniously in the lap of a secretary whose name had been romantically connected with his own, the mood turned nasty. Security was summoned, and before they could even gather up their files, the Proofreaders found themselves manhandled from the chamber, with cries of ‘Fools!’ and ‘Traitors!’ flying about their ears.
*
Having resisted the Fathers the longest, it was Fluxman who took their rejection most to heart. That night, on his return from the Café Europa, where he and the others had drowned their sorrows, he went to his study. He opened the telephone directory and paged to the L’s. There were three Lumleys. Which was which? Never mind, he would dispense with them all. He took up his weapon of choice. He chewed the pink rubber, savouring its familiar tang, and gazed at the columns of names and numbers. They were restless, squirming and writhing, jostling one another. A riotous assembly. Setting his jaw, he dr
ew three neat lines through the Lumleys and inscribed a curly bracket and a single delete mark in the margin.
Then his conscience assailed him, and he quickly restored the deletion.
*
As the disorder grew, so did the Fathers’ determination to overcome it. Team after team of brightly clad workers were dispatched to put things straight. In addition to the usual repairs and maintenance – attaching splints, driving in staples, welding railings, tarring poles, clearing pathways, burning firebreaks – they began to take an interest in the smallest details. Minders were employed to sit on park benches just to weigh them down, to cross the street whenever the little green man bade them walk, to cock the ears of the teacups in a westerly direction.
All this amateurish tinkering only hastened a spectacular descent into chaos. One morning, Alibians awoke to find that St Cloud’s Square had come adrift and rotated to the opposite quarter of the compass; had it not been moored in the south-east by the Musical Fountains of the Seven Martyrs, it would surely have floated away altogether. Glancing up as usual at the clock tower of St Cloud’s cathedral, as they filled their kettles at the kitchen sink, or threw open the shutters to do their morning exercises, or stooped to bring in the milk from their doorsteps, people saw nothing but sky.
On the outskirts of Alibia, among the sporting-goods factories and balsa-wood mills, in the peri-urban badlands, in the housing estates and low-cost townships, where the building regulations had never been applied with rigour and foundations were shallow, the disorder was precipitate. Whole streets suddenly banged together, like two halves of a book slammed shut by a reader, smashing everything in between, animate and inanimate, to pulp and tinder. Blocks of flats turned topsy-turvy, raining down the occupants and their possessions, and re-established themselves with their roots of cables and pipes twisted in the air, like so many baobab trees. People found themselves living on top of one another, cheek by jowl with exactly the types they wanted nothing to do with.
The Restless Supermarket Page 22