by Brian Aldiss
With the house between the fighters and the streetlamps, it was dark in the small back garden. He was at an advantage; he knew where things were. He had realised that, for all his aggressiveness, the taxi driver was a foot shorter than he. This was not an invincible enemy. The thought gave him hope. He set to work to manoeuvre Dwyer where he wanted him.
It did not take long. Dwyer stopped shouting and started to pant. The waltz they were doing became slower, the turns more gradual, even the supply of swear words more halting.
‘You leave my bloody missus alone – we got no quarrel between us,’ Dwyer said.
‘She’ll never come back to you.’
‘I rescued her from a life of drudgery.’
‘She hates your guts.’
‘You should have met her father.’
‘She hates your guts, Dwyer!’
And there they were. Putting all his strength into it, Billing charged. With the business end of the brush in Dwyer’s chest, he was forced to run backwards. There were only three or four steps to go. The next moment the back of his legs struck the curve of the side of the old bath.
He gave a cry and fell in backwards, helpless to save himself.
The bath was full of dark and oily rainwater, under which all kinds of unnameable things lurked. Among those things Dwyer was momentarily to be numbered. He surfaced, spitting and retching. Billing pushed him under again with the head of the broom.
‘I’m – help, I’m drowning!’ cried Dwyer, gasping. Billing pushed him under a third time, enjoying it. He thought he could actually drown the man and who would know? It would make the world a better place.
‘Swear you’ll stay out of our way and never bother Rose again,’ he shouted, when Dwyer next surfaced. He kept up the pressure with the broom against Dwyer’s chest.
‘Yes, yes, I swear. Let me out of this filthy muck.’ He spat a leaf out.
‘Swear!’ Prod, thrust.
‘Yes, yes, I did swear. I do. No more, guv, help me!’
Billing stood alertly by with his trusty weapon and allowed Dwyer to climb out of the bath and flop on his hands and knees. Dwyer pulled himself up to head blindly for the entrance, hands out before him. All fight had left him.
‘And never come bloody back,’ Billing shouted, as the defeated foe climbed damply into his vehicle and drove away with his friend. The taxi vanished round the corner of the street.
‘You’re marvellous, Hughie,’ Rose said, embracing him. ‘You settled his hash. Come on in and let me mop your poor dear nose.’
‘I fixed him,’ Billing said, proudly letting his nose stream. ‘I sure fixed him good.’ John Wayne couldn’t have managed better.
‘Your poor nose.’ She put a hand on his arm.
‘Don’t bug me, woman,’ he said.
Then he caught hold of her hand and went indoors with her, rather shakily, dripping blood.
Back in St Albans, Billing went to the doctor and got a certificate to remain a week off work. Not only was his nose grotesquely swollen; two crescent moons of a troubled crimson appeared to underline his eyes. It was a time to lurk away from the sight of men and, more particularly, from inquisitive small boys.
Nothing could injure his morale. He had fought and won. Now at last he would have a home he could legitimately call his own – its integrity gained in combat, as it were. He had at last found a native hearth and a surcease from wandering. His old recurrent dream had fulfilled itself; he was at last allowed home to his own fireside.
Yet his spirit, he told himself, was not entirely at rest. As he interpreted the dream, it was his parents who should have admitted him to the lesser home within the greater. He did not see the dreadful Dwyer as standing in loco parentis; that had been Gladys’s role.
These thoughts no more than ruffled the surface of his sea of calm. Yet they recurred when he sat in the old armchair during a week when he might have been working and instead sailed steadily on through the deep waters of the tome entitled The Psyche and Dream Journeyings.
In its pages, he encountered people with all kinds of strange misapprehensions, living distorted lives. ‘Thank heavens I’m not like them,’ he said to himself, marvelling. He read of a woman who could not distinguish her husband from other men, a man who could make love only when clutching a baby pig and other extraordinary cases. He wondered what those cases would have done with their lives if they had not suffered from their disabilities. It soothed him to think how lucky he and Rose were to be normal.
Before they returned to Shepherd’s Bush the next weekend, they gave notice of the move to the landlord of their flat. Their new house was now fit to live in.
It was late when they arrived in Shepherd’s Bush on the Friday night. Walking through the fresh new rooms together, still smelling appetisingly of paint, they decided to go to bed at once so as to make an early start in the morning, laying vinyl flooring in the spare bedroom and finishing the tiling of the bathroom.
Before turning in, Billing took a stroll alone in the garden. He wished to see the old bath which had played such a vital part in his victory over Dwyer. The black water which half-filled the receptacle lay still, without a ripple. It reflected the moon, full that evening and shining overhead, sublimely free of the rooftops and chimney pots.
His heart seemed to open as he gazed up at it. Not just a dead world but a symbol trailing its mythic connotations across the sky. Beautiful, inspiring. He recalled some of the strange associations the doomed people in his book had conjured up: the moon, for instance, as a female spirit, as the Anima in men’s minds.
The book of dream journeyings made mention of the baboons at the great temple of Borabadur who perform a gesture of adoration when the moon rises. All savages fear the dark, some believing the day to be God’s creation and the night the product of the devil, of Satan. So the moon is a heavenly promise. Its crescent is symbolic allusion to the power of the feminine principle. ‘Diana, huntress, chaste and fair …’ There is a timeless quality about her, suggesting wisdom. When the Anima is encountered in dream wanderings, it is like a visitation from the moon among the thickets of the night; and then the Anima often manifests herself as a young woman, to offer guidance or temptation. Her appearance is frequently a sign that a period of confusion and trouble – the night journeying of the psyche – will give way to the daylight of individuation. Anima dreams can be memorably vivid, lingering on in retrospect as tokens of hope long after other dreams have faded with break of day. All this and more, for the books on Gladys’s shelves were ample in discussion. Billing hardly knew whether or not to believe them, but the fact was that he wished to do so, for obscure reasons, and so he remained entertained if not convinced.
As he walked by the bath with these and similar thoughts in his mind, his gaze on the sky, the moon, at the extreme end of his walk before he turned about, appeared to become entangled in the bare branches of an ash tree.
So greatly did this sight move Billing that he stumbled back inside the house, as if he could bear no more loveliness.
He thought of that loveliness again after he and Rose had made love, after he turned the light off and darkness filled their little room. In his present complacent state, he realised, he had had no dreams he remembered for some while. Nothing, except the nightmare provoked by George Dwyer’s flung brick. It was as though the moon had not shone on his sleep.
The pale moonlight was already at their window panes. Humbling himself, Billing carefully formed words like a prayer in his mind: ‘Oh, Anima, I believe in you. Visit me, speak to me, in my dreams tonight, fair creature.’
On waking, he knew the Anima was alive in his mind, almost as tangible as Rose’s head on the adjacent pillow. She was there, leaving only as his eyes opened. She spoke to him.
What she said was: ‘Your parents loved you all along.’
Billing rose in a daze and went into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, feeling his face. Letting water run into the bath, he went and sat in it naked. He
sighed, shook his head, marvelled.
It was the truth. Something had responded to his entreaties. He never doubted for one moment that she – fickle though she might be – had visited him, had spoken – and of course had spoken truth. Undeniable Anima, undeniable truth.
Lying back in the water gasping, he clasped the soap like a heart to his chest. Yes, yes, she had spoken! He was in communication with himself. The psyche had made a true dream journeying and returned from it with treasure. His parents loved him.
His father loved him. All these years, the ghost of his father, of that falling ladder, had not been laid. In his childish mind, he had seen himself as either the subject or the object of the accident, as responsible for it, or as purposely injured by it. He had held the belief that his father died to punish him. Somehow the poisonous error had always lodged within him like a wound.
Of course that was nonsense. His father loved him. His Anima declared it.
Again the ladder was falling. Again he heard his father’s hoarse cry for help. Then the smash of ladder and body against the concrete walk. He was running towards the smash, crying for his father not to be hurt. His father made no reply – his father who loved him.
It was all clear. He could recall it all for the first time. The fearful blankness had gone.
And his mother came running, pushing him away in her fright, clasping his father’s body.
He remembered it all. The weeping that followed. Weeks of weeping. His helplessness. His guilt. The funeral to which his mother thought it best not to allow him to go. His boyish agony over that: as if he had been turned away from the very grave. And all the time she and his father had loved him. Their dear son, their dear only son.
The joy could no longer be withstood. With a great shout, he jumped out of the bath and rushed into the bedroom, naked and dripping, to the sleeping Rose.
‘A miracle, a miracle!’ he shouted. ‘Rose, wake up.’
She sat up and threw back the bedclothes.
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you daft bugger.’
About the Author
Brian Aldiss OBE was a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. Born in Norfolk in 1925, after leaving the army Aldiss worked as a bookseller which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work, the story ‘Criminal Record’, appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Passing away in 2017, over the course of his life Aldiss wrote nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories – becoming one of the pre-eminent science fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Also by Brian Aldiss and published by HarperCollins
Fiction
When the Feast is Finished
Finches of Mars
Report on Probability A
The Malacia Tapestry
The Male Response
Walcot
The Primal Urge
Brothers of the Head
Enemies of the System
Comfort Zone
Eighty Minute Hour
Jocasta: Wife and Mother
The Brightfount Diaries
Super-State
A Chinese Perspective
The Squire Quartet
Life in the West
Forgotten Life
Remembrance Day
Somewhere East of Life
The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy
The Hand-Reared Boy
A Soldier Erect
A Rude Awakening
The Monster Trilogy
Dracula Unbound
Frankenstein Unbound
Moreau’s Other Island
Short Story Collections
The Complete Short Stories: The 1950S
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 1)
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 2)
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 3)
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 4)
The Complete Short Stories: The 1970S (Part 1)
The Complete Short Stories: The 1970S (Part 2)
Non Fiction
Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s
The Twinkling of an Eye
Collected Essays
This World and Nearer Ones
Pale Shadow of Science
The Detached Retina
And the Lurid Glare of the Comet
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