King of the World

by Celia Fremlin

  No point in guessing at this stage. Diana would explain it all when she came back.

  But when would she come back? Already she had been gone for quite a long time – twenty minutes at least. Bridget consulted her watch; and presently, when a full hour had passed, and the winter daylight was already beginning to fade, she leaned forward and gave Alistair a sharp prod between the shoulder-blades.

  “I think we ought to do something,” she said to the large, slumped back in front of her, watching it stir reluctantly. Either he had been asleep or he had been pretending to be – a good ploy for anyone who wanted to avoid whatever is going to happen next.

  “Good idea,” he agreed. “Off you go. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be quite comfortable here on my own.”

  Before Bridget had thought up a sufficiently stinging rejoinder to his pusillanimous suggestion, she was interrupted by a little cry of relief from Norah and a spasm of her slight body as she jerked bolt upright.

  “Diana! She’s coming! Look, she’s waving … Oh, thank goodness!” and through the gathering twilight they could see Diana hurrying – indeed running, as much as she could in those stylish boots – towards them.

  “Oh, he’s so handsome!” were her first words. “An absolute smasher! Photogenic to the N’th degree!”

  Who was? Christopher, or the dreaded Mervyn? But Diana’s next words set Norah’s immediate fears to rest.

  “Come on, Norah! He wants to see you, he really does. I’m sorry I’ve been so long, but I had to make sure his father wasn’t there. I mean, he might have been in the garden or somewhere. But he’s not. Christopher isn’t expecting him back till quite late, so now is your time. He’s waiting for us.”

  Still Norah seemed to hesitate. Her first surge of relief at Diana’s reappearance seemed to be fading, and once again she clutched at Bridget’s hand.

  “Please come with us,” she begged. “I’m … That is, I wouldn’t like … But with three of us … Of course I know he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but …”

  For the second time that afternoon Bridget found herself unsure of her true motivations. One of them, certainly, was to put Alistair to shame, there where he lounged, once again tactically asleep, behind the steering-wheel. How cowardly can you get? Not that accusations of cowardice would have succeeded in putting him to shame, not in the least. Alistair treasured his failings as if they were essential qualifications for the good life. Which perhaps they were? But by now the threesome were out in the street, hurrying to their destination, and Bridget had to abandon her self-searching.

  Chapter 12

  Handsome, Smashing. Photogenic. Meeting Christopher Payne for the first time, Bridget felt she could have endorsed all these epithets. He had a charming smile, too, and as he greeted her, so tall, so fair, and somehow aristocratic-looking, she found it almost impossible to believe that there was anything at all the matter with him. With a positively heart-warming display of old-world courtesy, he helped her off with her coat and led her into what was evidently the family sitting-room, and soon she was settled in one of the large, old-fashioned armchairs that filled a large proportion of the available floor-space. The whole room was, by Bridget’s standards, sadly over-furnished. With its patterned curtains, patterned carpet and patterned upholstery, it had a restless air, and Bridget found herself wondering, idly, whether a small boy’s psyche might actually have been affected by being brought up amid so many clashing patterns and decorations? A ridiculous idea really, and one that would never have occurred to her had she never been told that her young host was mentally unbalanced. Absurd to think that his parents’ taste in furnishings could seriously upset a child’s mental balance. All over the world children are brought up amid all sorts of surroundings. They are brought up in cardboard boxes, in royal palaces, in disused railway sidings, in high-rise flats, in mud huts, in isolated farmhouses, and there is not a shred of evidence that any one of these environments produces more – or fewer – schizophrenics than any of the others.

  Really, she must stop thinking of this polite and well-mannered young man as a schizophrenic. Whether he was or wasn’t, it was unfair to regard this as his defining quality, and to weigh up everything he did or said with reference to it.

  “I expect you’d like some tea after your journey,” he said, “I’ll go and ….”

  But almost immediately the courteous gesture was quite spoiled – it seemed to Bridget – by Norah scrambling clumsily to her feet and interrupting him.

  “No, no, Chris, dear, it’s all right, I’ll make it,” she cried, and hastened, as if for dear life, out of the room and towards the kitchen.

  This left Christopher alone with the two visitors. Unlike most teenage boys when confronted by their mother’s friends, he showed no awkwardness or embarrassment, but made convincing small-talk until his mother returned, pushing a trolley of hastily-assembled tea-things. Then he helped gracefully with the passing-round of biscuits and tea-cups. Shortly afterwards he excused himself, explaining that he had homework to do.

  The three women looked at each other. In the circumstances, it was difficult to know what to say.

  “What a charming boy!” Bridget commented at last. This, surely, could do no harm, and was incidentally true.

  Diana expressed whole-hearted agreement. “And not only charming, but so self-possessed, and so easy to talk to. Such interesting ideas, too: you’d never guess that he was …” Here she stumbled to a halt, just in time, and hurried on, anxious to cover up her gaffe. “He and I had such an interesting talk before you came along. He told me all about his school, and what a pity it is they haven’t got adequate science labs. He’s hoping to go in for genetics, you know, and though they’ve got plenty of facilities for chemistry and physics, they can’t apparently provide him with … What’s the matter, Norah? Why are you looking like that?”

  “Nothing. I’m not looking like anything,” Norah mumbled; and then: “I’m just thinking, actually, that we ought to be going. I mean, we’ve left Alistair all on his own in the car … And now that I’ve seen that things here are going on all right – more or less – Yes, I think we should go.”

  Stepping out of the centrally-heated house into the outdoors was almost literally a breath-taking experience. The wind had risen since they were last outside and was hurling great blocks of jagged rain-cloud across the sky, bringing to the dull suburban street a sense of vast spaces, of unimaginable distance. The roadside trees were bending before it, creaking and swaying, and shadows from the bare twigs leaped and danced on the lamplit pavement.

  *

  The car was gone. At first, they thought that Alistair had simply grown fed up with waiting and had deserted them – no one would have put it past him – but a brief search revealed that this was not the case. He had simply driven round the corner into a road bordering the local park. Here the street lighting was sparse, the passers-by few, and he felt, he explained, less conspicuous.

  “I was beginning to get funny looks, you see, parked there for hours and hours … (“Barely an hour!” Diana was protesting, but he silenced her with a look) For hours and hours outside Number 92. ‘What gives at Number Ninety-two?’ the passers-by must have been thinking, and the peerers from behind lace curtains; and it occurred to me that I might be in dead trouble if I stayed there. I mean, suppose some stupid kid gets herself murdered this very evening? All the neighbours will at once jam the police phones describing this disreputable and criminal-looking type they’d noticed lurking in a parked car all evening. Some of them will even have managed to recall the number. Amazing, isn’t it, how people not only notice the number of other people’s cars, but also remember it, days afterwards, when they are being interviewed. When did you last memorise the number of someone else’s car? Still, that’s how it is, and so that’s why I moved on. I knew you’d find me in the end, especially with Cleversticks here (he jerked his elbow towards Bridget) to help you.

  “So come on. Three chattering females on board will allay suspi
cion one hundred percent.”

  Diana slipped swiftly into the front passenger seat, while Norah wrestled ineptly with the rear door. Bridget seized a moment to look up at the black, star-spangled sky – the sort you never saw in London. Orion had risen, and Sirius; you could almost make out the seventh star of the Pleiades, so brilliant was the tangled web of them.

  But now Alistair had switched on his headlights, and the heavens were obliterated.

  The journey back, in the reverse direction to the rush-hour traffic, was comparatively speedy, and enlivened by Diana’s enthusiastic – not to say ecstatic – account of her private conversation with Christopher.

  “He was wonderfully forthcoming,” she enthused. “He answered at length every single thing I asked him. I just love the way his yellow hair falls across his forehead when he tosses his head and smiles … it’ll be brilliant on camera! He says he would love to be interviewed on television. He’s into genetic engineering, you know – I think I told you. He’s been working on spiders and on centipedes, and he’ll soon be in a position to insert a gene for intelligence into them! Isn’t that amazing? Genetic engineering is right at the top these days, after all that stuff about genes for homosexuality, and that mouse – the Onco-Mouse – with genetically-engineered cancer. It provoked more viewer-response even than sex-aids for the disabled. It’ll be a winner! Jeremy’ll get the production team onto it at once.

  “The only thing is, though, Christopher thinks his father won’t be too keen. He says his father’s very rigid, and hide-bound by his professional status. So he suggests I come when his father’s not there. Like tomorrow, he thought, as it’s his father’s weekend on duty …”

  Here she paused, evidently choosing her words for the next bit.

  “Of course, the whole thing will be completely anonymous, we don’t need to involve Dr Payne at all; and I’m sure Norah won’t object, will you, Norah? I mean, it’ll be such a boost to the boy’s self-confidence, won’t it? Usually, no one listens to him, he says, and so to have millions of people, all listening …”

  Here she turned right round in her seat to face Norah, the headlights of oncoming cars leaping in bars of light and shadow across her eager face.

  “You wouldn’t stand in his way, would you Norah? Surely you wouldn’t?”

  Chapter 13

  Would she? Norah had evaded a clear answer as they raced along the motorway. What with the noise, and the speed, and the on-and-off darkness blurring the expression on one’s face, it had been easy. But it was different once they were back at the flat, where Alistair had dropped them before speeding off to enjoy the rest of the weekend on his own – or not on his own, who could tell? Fortunately, Diana did not seem to be bothered. Not at the moment, anyway; she was far too busy telephoning people with names like Jeremy and Adrian about her exciting new project.

  Lying on her bed, racked with nerves, Norah struggled to make out, through the half-open door, exactly what these telephone calls were about; but although she could hear clearly enough the high-pitched excited tones of the speaker’s voice, the actual words were inaudible.

  Was Diana, brazenly and selfishly, ignoring Norah’s wishes in the matter? Or had she genuinely supposed that Norah’s evasive murmur in the car had amounted to a tacit consent?

  But what Diana might be thinking and believing was only half of the problem. The other half was Norah’s own uncertainty and doubt. Because what Diana had said was true – to be on television, expounding his bizarre views to millions, would indeed be an ego-boost to Christopher such as he hadn’t enjoyed for years – not since he had been the mathematical boy-wonder enjoying the amazed adulation of parents and teachers and (to a lesser extent) the reluctant admiration of his class-mates.

  Was an ego-boost exactly what he needed? Might it, conceivably, sweep the delusions once and for all from his contorted mind? Was he, perhaps, just on the point of recovery anyway? They do say, don’t they, that no one ever does “recover” from schizophrenia – the most that can be hoped for is occasional remissions. On the other hand, there had never been any official diagnosis of schizophrenia in Christopher. On the contrary his father, an accredited expert on the subject had firmly and consistently denied that his son suffered from any mental illness at all.

  Occasionally, over the dark and chequered years of Christopher’s worsening spells of distorted thinking and bizarre behaviour, Norah had tormented herself with doubts about her own sanity. Could Mervyn possibly be right in his insistence that it was her neurotic and abnormal behaviour that compelled Christopher to behave neurotically and abnormally in self-defence? These thoughts would creep upon her whenever her son was in a “good” mood for any length of time – when he was enjoying a remission would be another way of putting it. During these spells he would be well-behaved, even good company, and would keep out of trouble at school. But each time, just as Norah was beginning to relax her guard; to hope, cautiously, that this might be the beginning of permanent recovery – at just this point, when her vigilance began to lapse – some new and awful thing would happen: an unpredictable and totally bizarre delusion would suddenly obsess him, and drive him to terrifying lengths of – well – of madness. No other word for it.

  Like this genetic engineering fantasy, which had so intrigued Diana. Knowing nothing whatever about genetic engineering except that it achieved top ratings on T.V. programmes – and, terrifyingly, this was all that she needed to know – she seemed quite oblivious to the fact that everything Christopher had been telling her was complete and total nonsense. Must be nonsense. Even in the most advanced genetic-engineering centres in the world, they had only managed so far to engineer tiny modifications in existing creatures; and now here was an eighteen-year-old boy, still at school, and with no access to any sort of appropriate equipment – here was this boy assuring Diana that he, single-handedly, had engineered all sorts of new and extraordinary creatures; and that, yes, he could produce them in front of the cameras when required.

  Rationally, one might assume that he was pulling her leg; but, alas, he wasn’t. Norah was the only person in the world who could know for certain that he wasn’t, because she was the one who had been there when it all began.

  It had been a few months ago; and, as commonly happened, there had been a spell of comparatively quiet and acceptable behaviour before this latest leap into the darkness that lurked always, waiting, somewhere inside his skull.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, and Christopher for some reason – maybe a quite legitimate one, she couldn’t remember – was home from school. The two of them were in the sitting-room listening to a Mozart piano sonata on the radio. The piece had been a favourite of Christopher’s – he had even played it when he was younger and when all his talents, musical and mathematical, were at their height.

  The third movement was just coming to an end when, without warning, Christopher sprang from his deep armchair, hurled himself upon the set and slammed off the music in mid-bar.

  “How dare they!” he muttered, “That’s my frequency!” and he began, with urgent abandon, to switch from station to station, pausing nowhere. Broken sentences – half bars of music – snatches of foreign speech – unintelligible wails and bursts of laughter – a Shakespearian voice enunciating less than half a line from somewhere – at which, with an angry gesture, Christopher switched the thing off and turned on his mother.

  “You heard that?” he challenged her. “All those channels – all those voices? All of them invisible, coming through the air – right? Yet everyone thinks they’re real, don’t they? Why are mine the only voices that no one believes are real? Listen …”

  He sat absolutely still, his head tilted to one side, listening; and Norah found that she, too, was tilting her head on one side and listening. It seemed impossible not to do so. The intensity of a mad person’s certainty is irresistibly compelling.

  How long did they sit like this? She heard a car passing and then another. She heard a garden gate squeak, she heard f
ootsteps on the pavement. After a bit, she began to hear her own breathing, and then her own heart, thump, thump, thumping.

  Presently, her son spoke.

  “There! Didn’t I tell you? Now you’ve heard it for yourself! They’ve given me the code – the genetic code! I must write it down immediately, I mustn’t forget a single thing …” and he rushed upstairs.

  Later, on his desk – that desk which she and Mervyn had bought with such pride for their brilliant son, all those years ago – she found, as she’d feared she would, the “genetic code”. Pages and pages of cramped, tiny writing, dotted all over with tiny chemical formulae; illegible, unintelligible, and full of menace.

  He was off again.

  That evening he brought his mother a dead spider, its eight lifeless legs curled tightly around its belly. He explained to her that it had unfortunately died during the experiment in genetic engineering. “At first I thought I’d got one of the formulae wrong; but I’ve checked it right through, and everything’s correct. The only other possibility is that it’s the wrong kind of spider. I just found it, you see, in a corner of the ceiling, and that’s much too random a way of locating specimens. You don’t know what you’re getting. In future, I’m going to make my own spiders, I shall genetically engineer them to be exactly as I want them. Then I can’t go wrong. The next one will survive, I promise you.”

  And sure enough it did. It scuttled away at high speed the moment he laid it before her, and he crowed with delight.

  “You see! It’s worked! It’s alive – I’ve given it life! It’s running! Its legs are working, all eight of them – see?”