Ruins

by Brian Aldiss

  He practised looking either very friendly or very hostile. He had always had the reputation among his friends of being able to take care of himself.

  But Billing was defenceless against the pale girl in the track suit whom he met in a branch of the First National Bank in Santa Barbara. She overheard his accent, accused him of being English, and then bought them both hamburgers with chillies, which they ate, knee to knee, in a crowded Spanish-type bar. She mostly laughed when she talked.

  Cathy was a waif, a stray like Billing. Billing lived with her, or sometimes a friend of hers, for two years, mainly because of the short blonde hair, the fragrant little body under the track suit and her lostness. In all that time, he had no communication with England. Not so much as a postcard passed from him. The country of his birth sank below the horizon of his thought like an over-ripe moon.

  Yet the moon still gleamed somewhere in memory, occasionally with brilliance. It outshone even the bright dusty Californian sun.

  He sat one hot and nameless day in Choplickers, teasing a strawberry-and-passionfruit milk shake while waiting for Cathy. He was wrapped within his usual self-generated enchantment when realisation of his surroundings dawned. The little café was shrouded in darkness at midday, its low-wattage lights shielded by lead shades and aimed at the walls, as if its designer had previously worked only on war rooms. The one small window, against which Billing sat, was a blemish in its armour. With the air-conditioning, the temperature was just above freezing; yet most of the occupants wore dark glasses. Everywhere in Europe, in response to such fine weather, cafés would have spilled tables, chairs, trolleys, plants, and magisterial waiters out on to the sidewalks, in the fresh air.

  Gazing through the window at the automobiles gliding by, Billing saw that they too had their windows tight closed against the heat. Like Choplickers, they were air-conditioned. In England, the car windows would be open, their drivers nonchalant, with bare elbows pointing out towards the traffic. He imagined un-American things like cyclists, pedestrians, roundabouts, horses and carts.

  Oh, well, he thought, at least he had outrun Wilfred Wills …

  What he wanted was a close friend to whom he could describe lyrically the delights of Cathy’s body, perhaps in particular the enchanting colours and contours of her buttocks; but he had never indulged in such confidences. Some elements of life remained obstinately unspoken and therefore, perhaps, unrealised; such deprivation was unfashionable on this shore of the Pacific, where telling formed a part of doing.

  Inside his own air-conditioning, he was doomed to stay silent, with a quality of reticence which set him apart, even in the humble matter of Cathy’s bum, not from experience itself – far from it – but from the liberation that Californians relied on experience to bring.

  He decided that he was reasonably content to view his life as an ambiguous artefact, since he saw all life as enigmatic. Being lost was an adequate substitute for finding yourself. There was to be no attempt to control the flow of circumstance. Just as there was never an attempt to get anything more from the women who loved him than that which they chose to offer.

  His thoughts turned yet again to his mother. Those stories of hers to which June and he, when small, had listened so inattentively. Had they been of Wales or Egypt? Had they been true? While he waited in Choplickers for the girl who might never arrive, he wished he could recall them. The stories had been memorials to good times enjoyed by his mother when young, precious to her, meaningless to her children. And now lost for ever, even if they had been – like her goodwill – largely fake.

  An hour later Cathy showed up with a couple of friends. She found Billing rather silent.

  She was slowly introducing him to a new way of life. She was a course-addict, she admitted, sometimes taking as many as five different courses in a week, dropping some and picking up others as casually as if Scuba, Origami and Algebra were playing cards. Billing contrasted this confusion favourably with his own apathetic state of mind in which nothing was done. Cathy had no firm beliefs, except the belief that she could better herself against the day she became a Hollywood star, although the betterment never became apparent, even to her.

  At this time, all California was into space research, in an effort to better itself. Inspired, Billing decided he too would better himself. He ran his own course. It paid better.

  The course – in Remedial Domesticated Space – was his own invention and the phrase had irresistible rhythm. He taught the hitherto undiscovered relationships between human beings, the synthetic environments they created and occupied and mental health. He supported his talks with multi-media presentations which grew ever more ambitious as the size of his audience increased. The word ‘Remedial’ was one no true Californian could resist.

  ‘RDS is the new pace-setter for a revolutionary perception of our fair city,’ announced the host of the first TV chat show on which Billing appeared, dressing in something described as a shortie caftan. ‘And it has taken an Englishman to figure out the secret anatomy of our complex Californian life-style.’

  Billing had a success on his hands, his first real success since ‘Side Show’. He found himself working hard, engaged, making sense of the absurd proposition he had launched. He lectured at Berkeley. He became a celebrity. He wore designer track suits. He totalled his Cadillac on Interstate 5. He opened a new marina. There was excited talk of his designing a ‘Star Trek’ movie. Big money once more moved his way.

  But Cathy held his wandering attention still, Cathy and the strange tribal drop-out society in which she lived. She remained a waif, a squatter in corners. She dreamed of grey beaches, with seals. She did not realise she had Billing. She kept hold of nothing, not even her five-year-old daughter, Pash, to whom she had inadvertently given birth. One day, Cathy lost Pash in a shopping mall; it was two days before she realised the child was missing. She would not phone the police in case her father, executive of a video company specialising in splatter movies, caught up with her. One day, on the way to a baseball game, she let go of Billing’s hand in the crowd. He never saw her again.

  She never even showed at the apartment they rented. Eventually her exotic fish died. Billing switched out the light over the tank, collected his things and left.

  The ‘Star Trek’ deal fell through. A producer phoned him and wept while breaking the news. His tears sounded like they were real.

  ‘Worse things happen,’ Billing said. He meant it. He hung up. It was 1978.

  He handed over the Remedial Domesticated Space course to an electronics engineer named Teddy Sly who was working with him. Sly insisted on paying him five thousand dollars for the goodwill. He also bought Billing a sumptuous volume of the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe as a farewell gift.

  Billing woke one morning in a strange bed, decided he did not care for the expression on the face of the woman sleeping beside him and once more walked out into the harsh sunlight. The road smelt of pistachio. He was disoriented. He felt sick. Hostile suburbs sprawled all about. The space ratios were distorted, expressing a general defeat which the denizens of the area did not yet realise they had suffered. Lateral expanse without elevation, Billing told himself.

  He found a Mexican restaurant. It was called ‘The Happy Taco’. The sign formed a dismally solitary landmark. A truck with New York licence plates stood in the parking lot. While Billing stood staring at it, the truck driver came out of the diner, smoking a cigar and scowling. Under one arm he carried a plastic two-gallon box of brandy.

  ‘You waiting for something, Charlie?’

  ‘Where are you heading?’

  ‘East. What of it?’

  ‘Mind giving me a ride?’

  ‘Climb in. Just don’t talk, is all.’

  The cab of the truck was crammed with publicity photos of other trucks and of space rockets. Billing surveyed them while the man stowed his brandy away in a locker. The photos were stuck everywhere, including the roof over the driver’s head, turning the confined space into a travelling s
crapbook.

  The driver wore a work-cap with goggles lodged on its peak, a brown leather jacket to which a sheriff’s star was pinned, jeans and a pair of calf-length leather boots. He drove for many miles in silence before bursting into speech.

  ‘Where you from, cowboy?’

  ‘LA.’ Seeing the ugly look the man shot him, Billing added, ‘England originally.’

  ‘England, huh? I heard of England right enough. The Domesday Book. I guess you think America’s great, right?’

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘“As a matter of fact”. What’s that mean? Let me tell you that this is the lousiest god-damned country ever lived. Full of stupid people got thrown out of other countries. Don’t know nothing. I don’t know nothing either: I ain’t just shooting my mouth. You know how many Americans are illiterate? Take a guess, percentage-wise … Almost a third. Almost a third of the citizens of this great country are illiterate. Hispanics, even worse. Over fifty per cent.’

  He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand before gesturing at the suburbs around them.

  ‘And they all like to huddle in cities. Illiterates together.

  What are they afraid of?’

  He fell silent.

  ‘Are you a Marxist?’

  ‘Hell, me? No,’ said the driver. ‘I believe in making money, not sharing it. It’s these hippies I can’t take. They don’t work, they huddle in cities, screwing. Me, I go for the open air life.’

  Memories of his Remedial Domesticated Space course returned to Billing. ‘Then this cab is too confining for you. It conflicts with your posited character. All these pictures you have round you merely hem you in. These lorries – sorry, trucks – they put you right in the middle of a mental traffic jam.’ They were leaving the suburbs now.

  The driver shot Billing an innocent look. ‘Is England full of cookies like you?’

  Gazing out at the bleached landscape, Billing suddenly recalled the Cotswolds, orderly fields, sheep, church spires, comfortable homesteads and a steady rainfall. He longed for a taste of scones and jam, the sight of a winding road, old ladies with library books to be changed.

  When they came to Waterloo, Iowa, Billing stopped off. He saw that the garden centre run by the two Jajack mothers had given place to a shopping complex. The American appetite for shopping never ceased to impress him. The complex was bigger than a cathedral. He arrived at Ludmilla and Josef’s house just in time for Josef’s funeral.

  ‘He never made it to Brno. We never rode in the High Tatras,’ Ludmilla said, gazing calmly at Billing from under a cute little black hat. Waterloo, Iowa, was a long way from LA and people still made concessions to mourning.

  While comforting the widow, Billing was overwhelmed by a tide of love. It burst over him unexpectedly, like a spring thaw in the Arctic. It was pure, as sparkling as a stream, as fresh as happiness, as toothpaste. Never had he wanted to console anyone so much. Most of the girls he loved needed consoling.

  Taking Ludmilla into his arms, Billing gazed into her beautiful tear-filled eyes and begged her to marry him. He had led an irregular life, but that was over. She was an exile, so was he; they would make a home together.

  ‘There’s a home here,’ Ludmilla said, with a sob that shook her upper parts.

  He assured her they would go wherever she wished, anywhere rather than stay in Waterloo, Iowa. Even to Brno in Slovakia, if she wished. He promised he would learn Czech.

  ‘Slovakian,’ she sobbed.

  Brushing the irrelevancy aside, he confessed to her how he had felt about her, how he had never forgotten her during his four years in California, how he had previously said nothing out of respect for Josef. His coincidental arrival at this time must mean something, must mean that they were intended for each other.

  ‘But Karel …’ she whispered. ‘There’s Karel …’

  She wept again and declared that she was happy in Waterloo, Iowa. She had never wanted to go to Brno. She had never wanted to ride in the High Tatras. She was scared of horses – and of High Tatras, come to that. All that was Josef’s dream, not hers. She had been longing for years to marry Karel, Josef’s handsome younger brother. He was the one scowling across the parlour at them, the muscular one, with the little finger missing from his left fist. She appreciated Billing’s kindness and why didn’t he take another cut of the spiced ham?

  He headed for New York, to spend another two years of oblivion there, as though years were as inexhaustible as American miles. During this time, on an impulse, he sent a postcard to England, to Mrs Gladys Lee.

  When he returned to the surface again, so did images of England. His money from the Remedial Domesticated Space project had all gone. New York was too world-weary to buy RDS. Billing found work around the Village until he had saved his air fare. Then he clipped his moustache, bought a cheap digital watch and returned home.

  The eighties had arrived in England, despite delays. Billing himself had changed. He admitted as much to himself as he confronted gritty old London: he was thin, strange, inexperienced, in a city now as cosmopolitan as New York and almost as dangerous. Billing wore a T-shirt and spoke what passed here as American. He was neither young nor old. He surveyed the traffic with a mid-ocean eye. In this sluttish town he felt like a virgin.

  Old friends had not returned to favourite haunts. His dead sister’s husband was not to be found. Probably working for the Arabs. He remembered his mother’s funeral, bleakly asking himself if it was because of her death that he had stayed so long abroad. In his hotel, the central heating sighed and made poltergeist noises after dark. Of remedial spaces he found none. Madness would pass unnoticed in such a place.

  An older man spoke to Billing on the stairs – a surprising event in itself in an establishment where guests made themselves shadowy, withdrawing into doorways and silences to obscure the stain of their lives.

  The man told Billing of a reasonable Indian restaurant nearby where one might eat cheaply.

  ‘We could go there this evening, why not?’ said Billing, on impulse.

  ‘You’re American, ain’t you? I thought you was.’

  There was a short cut behind a broken fence between two streets.

  A path led across a waste lot where an Edwardian block of flats had been demolished and nothing built in its place. Sorrel and nettles fringed the path. It was country for two yards. Walking along it to the restaurant, Billing remembered that he had recently had his recurrent dream again, his consolation.

  Together with the reassurance he felt lay a deeper, more permanent sensation, a suspicion that somehow he had allowed himself always to live cheek-by-jowl with his real life. Why this displacement? It was as if he had a doppelgänger; or, rather, as if he were merely a doppelgänger.

  ‘What do you make of England?’ the old man asked Billing, over a chicken biryani. He had a pale skin, a thick moustache and thinning hair, and the soft indefinable accent of someone born in one of London’s outer suburbs. His suit was of sombre, durable tweed; it would see him out.

  ‘I can’t tell. In the USA life is so much more expansive.’

  ‘It’s getting very expensive here, too. Everything’s going up. It’s the government, you’ve no idea.’

  ‘What I mean is – well, there’s just more hope in the United States. It may be an illusion, but optimism improves – well, it improves the quality of life. You’ve no idea.’

  He was embarrassed to think he had echoed the man’s final phrase.

  But his companion was not interested in the States. America for him was a dream. He was widowed and in his sixties. Suddenly, breaking a pappadom into two half-moons, he became talkative, though never eloquent. By scraps of revelation, like newspaper cuttings, he unfolded his present existence. His son and daughter-in-law had thrown him out of the room in their house he had occupied for five years. They were expecting a second child. His son had always been violent, even as a boy. He couldn’t explain. His friend lived nearby; he worked down the fire station.
Things were difficult. He needed to get a part-time job. Unfortunately, he had lost a suitcase full of belongings. Personal things. He had to go to Kingston. It was all chaos. Really, everything was like chaos. You had to get it together. He didn’t feel he had much longer. If only he could get it all together. He planned to write a letter to his son, explaining … Perhaps it would come right in the end.

  ‘Yes,’ Billing said. ‘I do hope so. Look, let me pay for the meal.’

  ‘I was a school-teacher once. One of my pupils became an airline pilot.’

  Billing looked for the man next morning at breakfast, when the smiling bright Pakistani girl who served in the hotel brought the grapefruit segments to his table. The man had gone.

  Billing too had his little quest. Inspired by isolation, he renewed contact with Mrs Gladys Lee, the missing brother-in-law’s mother. It was the only family connection he could recall.

  Gladys Lee had been old when he last saw her. She lived still at the same address. She answered the phone when he rang, voice creaking slightly, remembered his name without prompting and invited him round for a chat. He remembered ‘chats’. The word came back to him from long ago. He was happy she had not said ‘natter’.

  ‘Come and chat to me, Hugh. I mean to say, not to me, but with me … I’m tired of people who chat to me. It’s one way in which people take advantage of the old.’

  He appreciated her care with words, a quality with which his years in the States had made him unfamiliar. He bought a cheap suit, threw away his T-shirt and went to visit her in her unfashionable area of Shepherd’s Bush. The streets seemed narrow, all forehead and no jaw.