The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘A wise man, Mr Bottrall. And how do you feel on the subject of divorce?’

  ‘We’re – I’m very happily married. Six years now. My wife was previously divorced, but she doesn’t believe in it. You know what I mean …’

  ‘That’s good to hear; Penelope won’t let a good thing go, eh? Confidentially, I was married once, but it didn’t work out. My wife was very highly strung. Perhaps you’d like to hear about it?’

  They both stood. Bottrall undid his coat and lit himself a cigarette without putting down his glass. He passed the bloody handkerchief over his forehead.

  ‘I don’t want to seem inquisitive, Mr Stebbings,’ he said.

  Calculating it nicely, Stoneward nodded his head three times in approval of his friend’s excellent discreet temperament When he enquired about his religious views and learnt that the Bottralls went to church every Christmas, he observed that we did not know why life was to be preferred to death, adding, ‘But it is, and we shall know.’

  And his friend, drinking up, said unexpectedly that if those hooligans were ever caught they ought to be unmercifully flogged.

  Becoming suddenly crafty, Stoneward pretended he had taken no especial notice of this remark. By a devious route, he crossed to the window, legs going snicker-snee, and peered out. The street was anonymous under the weight of darkness, laid out as if for a cosmic museum, with its just quota of slot machines, concrete lamp standards and lighted sweet shop windows. And a man in an upper room stood in shirt sleeves preparing to play a violin.

  Taking heart from it all, Stoneward said, ‘That sounds more like the old Bottrall.’

  ‘You never knew the old Bottrall,’ said Bottrall, puzzled, looking at his empty glass.

  ‘No, but I can see fossil remains sticking out of you here and there.’

  ‘How d’you mean? You’re hard to understand, what you say.’

  Walking about nattily, collecting their two glasses, filling them, gnawing his lip, Stoneward discoursed on the art of living. ‘It is an art; of course, you are given your role, but it’s up to you to write your own dialogue and play it with style, not always bunched up in a shoddy overcoat. For god’s sake, man, we’re all up to our ears in the flow of events, but you can learn to swim, can’t you? I mean – I’m sure you’re with me! – buoyancy is all. Drink this and for god’s sake keep your little finger tucked in. This is what I’m trying to tell you: that everyone’s liable to get nervy and fed up. Well, think of them! Just unroll for those near to you the spectacle of yourself; do it with pleasure and humility – a bit of entertainment. Never egotistically, rather as an impersonal study of a man’s life, eh?’

  Bottrall’s lips were suddenly purple and spluttery. He flung down the glass he had just drained. Falling into an armchair, it failed to break.

  ‘You’re mad!’ he said. ‘Why should I listen to you?’

  Stoneward had him by the coat, as promptly as a ferret.

  ‘You’re not real till you’ve explained yourself! Tell me how you tick, unless you want to be hurt again. Think of the smelly canal water, Bottrall, and then let me down along the catwalks of your psychology, if you’ll forgive the phrase. Come on, I want to hear!’

  He was scared. Self-pity creased his face. He wanted to cry, but he steeled himself with a pathetic effort. Turning his head from Stoneward, he began to talk.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come here. It’s just – I hoped. We don’t trust people, Penelope and I. I mean … well, I somehow bored you, even when you said you liked me, didn’t I? That’s why I first began to keep away from people, years ago. Honestly, it’s terrible to know you bore people. You – nothing you do makes any difference. I don’t like boring people. I’m just made that way, though.’

  Stoneward had released him, but he went on talking uncontrolledly.

  ‘You said about secrets. That’s a secret. I share it with Penelope. She doesn’t mind. She doesn’t mind I’m boring. She’s very kind, and she thinks it’s safe. She’s right – being boring is safe, soothing … Well, it’s almost as safe as anything, although it doesn’t save you … you know … from being beaten up by hooligans.’

  Suddenly he rushed for the door, falling against it and flinging it open. He made sobbing noises as he padded down the landing, running, escaping, taking his mended face and broken spirit from harm’s way. So he scuttled down the stairs and into the night.

  Stoneward made no move to follow. He was still staring into the black hole of his confider’s existence; for minutes on end, it seemed to swallow him. Finally he looked up, becoming aware of his surroundings again. It was cold. In the room across the street, the man in shirt sleeves played his violin.

  Stoneward lit himself a cigarette and picked up Bottrall’s unbroken glass from the chair. He performed the actions with quite a brave flourish although there was no one to see him.

  Everything seemed to him now much darker than it had been. He sat on the edge of the desk examining himself, gradually growing angry. In all his unhappiness there had been consolations, and the greatest consolation had been to see himself as a man free of illusions. Now he saw that too was an illusion: for he had always claimed that only the intelligent suffer; Bottrall had proved that that was not so.

  When he had smoked the cigarette, Stoneward rose, spite making his expression keener. Thumbing viciously through the telephone directory, he found Bottrall’s number, repeating it to himself as he dialled.

  After a pause, a woman’s voice said unhelpfully, ‘Hullo.’

  ‘You must be Penelope. This is an anonymous admirer.’

  ‘Hullo? Who did you say it was?’ She sounded younger than he had expected.

  ‘I have some information about your dear husband, Penelope. He will return to you at any minute. I regret to say he has been drinking heavily. He is, in a word, sloshed.’

  ‘Who is that speaking?’

  ‘Penelope, if you do not recognise my voice, let me simply call myself, A Wellwisher. Your husband is on his way back to you.’

  ‘There’s someone at the door now.’

  ‘I imagine that should be him. I rang only to drop one confidential word in your ear. There is hope for you yet, Penelope. A chance exists that your husband, on his return, will have changed slightly. For the better, I mean. I mean, be less boring. Penelope –’

  ‘Wait!’ she said. He heard her receiver go down onto a table top; he heard her exclamation, ‘Hector, my dear!’ as cool and clear as an ice cube tinkling down the line. He heard distant snorts and sobs from Bottrall, lurching into the hall.

  Diminishing footsteps sounded, and the merging of two voices. The loving wife welcomes the return of the beastly old drunk, Stoneward thought, pressing the earpiece savagely to his ear as if he would burst into that distant world.

  He visualised it all. Bottrall seemed to be apologising incoherently, Penelope to be trying to soothe him. They were still at it as they slowly approached the phone, the slurred voice lamenting, the clear one reassuring. Then they had passed the phone, forgetting to replace the receiver, forgetting everything but their compulsory attitude to each other.

  ‘No …’ Stoneward whispered. This was what he feared and hated most.

  ‘Scrap those attitudes!’ he shouted. One man was himself; but between two people came attitudes like walls, never to be pulled down. His life was spent trying to jump these walls or demolish them, for Stoneward still hoped. Recognising Bottrall in the dentist’s, he had hoped again, for his own sake, for Bottrall’s, for Penelope’s; now the denial of it lay in that faint bumping which told him Bottrall was being helped upstairs to bed, helper and helped relishing their roles.

  ‘Penelope! Penelope!’ Stoneward cried, but his ex-wife never heard the crackle of her phone. As far as she was concerned that line was dead.

  For all Stoneward’s isolation, the hollow sound at his ear told him he was still connected to the past and to the future.

  Paternal Care

  Because it was so hot, the student sprawl
ed for a long while in the shade of a cliff and stared without interest at the landscape. There was not a great deal to see, if one looked at the matter from one point of view, although from another point of view there was much to see, and the much consisted mainly of sky and mountain.

  Beyond the great expanse of mountain on which the student was, lay another range of mountains, as thickly wooded as the nearer one was bare. A line of wooden watch towers, perched on stilts, stood along the farther mountains; on the nearer, the only signs of man were a hut and, near at hand, a tap, standing up rather rakishly from the rock at the end of a length of pipe. Since the pipe was close to the student, and in his line of view, he found it worthwhile looking at.

  He had used the tap some minutes ago and, after drinking at it, had neglected to turn it off properly, so that a series of droplets flashed from it down to the stoney ground. A pair of sparrows made fluttering trips from a nearby slab of rock and drank the drips as they left the mouth of the tap. A frog crawled from under the slab and hopped slowly under the tap, until the drips splashed from the ground onto its face. The student did not move.

  This was as far south as he had ever come, and this was as far south as he could go. The wooden watch towers housed foreign soldiers and stood on alien territory. Tonight, the sparrows might fly across the valley to roost and the frog might hop down into the brook in the valley, but the student could get no further than this hill; his country ended by the brook, and beyond it a different and conflicting ideology ruled.

  This thought occupied the student’s mind a good deal as he sat by the rock, but he could make nothing profound of it; after all, he supposed, a country must end somewhere. This desolate place, with only the meagrest of fields scratched at one point on the hillside, seemed as good a place as any for a country to end; in fact, it seemed less to end than to peter out, for on this side of the brook there were no soldiers and no watch towers, as if nobody back in the capital cared about this hill anyway.

  A woman was working on the patch of field. The student watched her occasionally, when his gaze drifted off the tap. He was interested to see whether she was young or old, ugly or attractive, but was not going to let such a question disturb his rest: the climb up the hill had been a long one. In any case, the woman was swathed in clothes and wore scarves about her head, so that it was difficult to make out much about her. She worked at the slow pace of the peasant, hammering the clods on her field until they shattered into grey dust. And her labours were constantly interrupted by her child.

  At first the student could not see whether the child was a child or a dog. It seemed, to his idle gaze, misshapen; but he was sprawled very low and the heat from the ground made everything near it tremble.

  The child came from the hut, which stood only a few metres from the field. It too seemed wrapped about with many clothes, in a way that the student supposed was characteristic of the region, and it was because of the behaviour of the child and its mother that his interest was slowly drawn away from the frog and the birds at the tap.

  The child persisted in coming out of the hut, while the mother constantly interrupted her labours to usher or carry it in again. When the child was safe inside once more, the mother would shut the door, but then the child climbed from the single stone window. The mother’s attitude to this behaviour appeared from a distance to be always the same: she went hurriedly to the child when it appeared, and then got it gently and firmly back into the hut. The child sometimes struggled wildly and cried aloud; sometimes it seemed resigned and allowed itself to be removed without protest.

  By its very repetition, this scene awoke interest in the student. Commonplace enough in itself, the mother’s concern for her child seemed so overpowering that the student began to puzzle about it. He became at first touched at her diligence, then amused, and finally irritated. Why should she be so persistent about seeing that the child kept within the hut? Since it was old enough to walk, it was old enough to come to no harm in the sun. Why could it not be free to play where it wished?

  It was his irritation that moved him. He got slowly to his feet, so that the woman would not notice him, for although she had observed him coming up the hill, he had sat in the shadow of the rock for so long he thought she must have forgotten him. The two sparrows scattered across the hillside, the frog quickly regained his hiding place under the rock, but the mother was just trying to lift the child into her arms, and had her back turned to him.

  Further down the hill and considerably nearer the hut was a jagged fin of limestone rock as tall as a man. Embarrassed by his own curiosity, the student doubled up and ran to it, flattening himself against its hot flank.

  Now his viewpoint had considerably changed. He saw that the nearer watch towers of the hostile nation were in fact very close, that he was under their surveillance. Sitting in the grim boxes were soldiers in steel helmets – but he saw also that they sprawled there motionless. For a moment, he felt a jolt of terror at the sight, wondering if they had been struck down, perhaps because of the subconscious association of soldiers with death; then it occurred to him, and he smiled with relief, that it was siesta time, and the siesta, like the birds, was able to cross frontiers.

  He turned to see what the woman and child were doing. She had just shut it in the hut again – its thin wail came to him – and as she turned to go back to the strip of field she directed a sharp glance at the cliff under which the student had recently been sitting. This covert stare of hers made him, for some reason, feel extremely guilty. He wished to continue on his march, but it was impossible to leave his present position without giving himself away; so he stayed where he was, till presently the child came out again.

  Being so much nearer, the student could now see more clearly what was happening. The door of the hut was secured only by a simple latch, which the child could dislodge from the inside with a stick. It stole out now and endeavoured to play in the dirt by the side of the house where it was concealed from its mother’s view. As it squatted there with its stick, he saw the child was a girl. She wore a long and dirty grey dress and was considerably hunch-backed.

  The student leant against the rock for a long while, staring across at the deformed child. While he looked, the child grew bolder. It played more widely, uttering little cries to itself. Not understanding the noises it uttered, he thought, ‘God, and it’s half-witted too!’

  The child’s mother interrupted her clod-breaking to stare across at the child and then at the cliff under which the student had rested. As he caught her look, and saw her return back to her work without interfering again with the child, he understood her former tiresome vigilance. A wave of discomfort ran through him. She had hidden the child away merely because she had been aware of his presence, and had wished to conceal its deformity from him. He wondered at such sensitivity in a peasant woman and feared for its effect on the child, who would have enough trouble from its deformity without adding to it a sense of shame. The whole business seemed the more pathetic since he now clearly observed that the woman was young and had a face as dark and beautiful as a face in the Byzantine frescoes of his native region.

  All his troubled thoughts were banished by the sound of a footfall behind him. He turned. A soldier had leapt across the brook and was rushing up the hillside after him. It was like a picture in a war magazine. The soldier had left his rifle propped against a tree on the other side of the brook, and was now running with an expression of savagery on his face and his hands clenched as if they could not wait to grasp the student’s neck.

  No sooner did the student see this awful sight than he took to his heels, running up the hill. He did not pause to argue that he was innocent of any evil thought against the woman: he fled. The soldier shouted and flung his helmet. It caught the student cruelly behind his left knee, on the soft popliteal flesh, so that he tripped and fell, with his hands in the stones and the enemy helmet rolling beside him. But in a flash he was up again, and running hard up the hillside.

  Only when he
was absolutely out of breath did he stop to look back. The soldier was now some way below him and had stopped the pursuit. Puffing and sweating and swearing to himself, the student sat on the bare hill and rubbed his leg. Small figures down below, the soldier went over to the woman and put his arms about her. The child ran across to them, and hugged one of the soldier’s uniformed calves; he lifted it so that he could embrace it and the woman at the same time. This he did only for a moment. Then he set the child down, cast a glance across at the watch towers, and ran back down the hillside, clutching his helmet. The deformed child stood waving to him long after he had crossed the brook and was among the trees of the further slope.

  The Plot Sickens

  Dear Editor,

  Having just read George Hay’s ‘Synopsis’ in IMPULSE 4 with the greatest enjoyment, I have decided to write you a story to – to what? To answer Hay’s? To supplement it? To extend it? Perhaps to plagiarise it, for I certainly think he has hit on a beautiful idea that will give the greatest delight to the greatest number of readers. And should not writers take advantage of the smallness of the science fiction field by conversing through fiction with one another?

  What George Hay has done is what Jimmy Ballard and Billy Burroughs are currently doing: straining out the fictive irrelevances from science fiction. We are all too sophisticated in the sixties to believe in characterisation, or in writers’ clumsy attempts to persuade us that their fiction is in any way real, or an account of actual events. All we need is the facts of the fiction.

  This is why we would not bother to see that long epic – what was it called now? – the film with what’s-her-name – Cleopatra, whereas we would have been the devoted slaves of a film about the making of Cleopatra. We can’t bear Somerset Maugham, but we read his notebooks. We need unshaped things: Fellini, Kafka’s unfinishable novels, fragments of newspaper headlines, our own lives. Edwin Drood is worth a ton of Little Dorrits.