Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  Striving to break from the networks of his terror, Burnell threw out his arms and peered along the wide lateral arm of the cathedral.

  “Anyone there? Help! Help! Taxi!”

  To the left, in the direction from which they had come, everything had been amputated by night, the black from which ignorance and imagination is fashioned. Toward the right, however, along that other orbit, something was materializing. A stain of uninvented liquid. An ox-bow of the Styx. Light with its back turned to the electromagnetic spectrum.

  “Help! My hour is almost come!”

  The devil still singing was approaching still.

  Atheist Burnell certainly was, in an age when no courage was denoted by the term. But too many years had been spent in his capacity as church custodian for WACH, investigating the mortal remains, the fossils, of the old faith of Christendom, for something of the old superstitions not to have rubbed off on him. He also had some belief in the Jungian notion of the way in which traits of human personality became dramatized as personages—as gods or demons, as Jekylls or Hydes. This singing devil, this bugaboo of bel canto, could well be an embodiment of the dark side of his own character. In which case, Burnell was the less likely to escape him.

  Nor did he.

  Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle toward that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian facade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man—however worthy of this unwedding cake—was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.

  If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.

  Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.

  “Mountebank!” he screamed as he went.

  But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up…

  … and bit off his head.

  Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was in her Madrid apartment with friends. It was late. The red wine of Andalucia was slipping down her red gullet as she talked to her friend Teresa Cabaroccas. The two women were discussing love in an age without faith. They’d been in a Madrid back street, watching a performance by a once famous flamenco dancer, now a little past it and married to an innkeeper. The singing had been in progress after midnight.

  “Oh, one more damned passionate wail!”—suddenly Blanche had screamed and stood up. She practically dragged Teresa from the crowded tavern.

  “Why have these people some kind of licence to yell their sufferings?”

  “The audience empathizes, Blanche. You can wallow in it for a bit, can’t you? And with the suffering—that spirited arrogance! Oh, it’s the arrogance I admire, not the suffering. The defiance of poverty, misery, betrayal, fate. The body says it, not just the voice…” Annoyed at being pulled from the entertainment she had not greatly enjoyed, Teresa was drinking as rapidly as Blanche.

  “Why shouldn’t I get up and wail my sufferings?” Blanche asked. “My bloody discontents? Wail them from—oh, the square, the mountains, the TV studios…” She kicked her shoes to the far end of the room and put her bare feet up on the table.

  “But your whole life—that speaks out for women, for fulfilment.”

  “Fulfilment. I spit on the word. When was anyone really fulfilled? When did anyone ever have enough? Tell me that. Go on, tell me when anyone ever had enough. I mean there’s not enough to have. The imagination’s always greedy for more. Like that Madame Fotril when I was a girl—she lived next door to us and she ate her five-year-old daughter, cooked—with cabbage, of all vile things. Cabbage! I’ve never eaten cabbage since. The mere thought makes me sick. And then my parents took me with them to the funeral. Funeral! What could have been in the coffin, I kept asking myself. I was possibly twelve, just growing breasts like unripe apricots and hair between the legs, and all I could think was that maybe the priest had thrown the saucepan into the coffin with the bones.

  “There was a woman—a fearsome woman—who wasn’t afraid of her imagination, who demanded enough, whatever it cost. Well, I feel like that. It’s love—no, it’s not really even love, it’s wanting something I can’t have, almost like a principle, the principle that we should never ever in this life be satisfied—”

  “Oh, calm down, we’ve all got problems,” said Teresa. She got up and walked unsteadily to the balcony, trying to cool her cheek against a stone pillar. “Who is this guy you were talking about, anyway? A Hungarian?”

  “Not a Hungarian,” said Blanche. She looked down into her glass, afraid to say “English” in case her Spanish friend laughed. She didn’t wish to spoil the drama of the moment.

  A pompous-looking man had accompanied them to the performance. He sat in a cane lounger with a lager on the table by his side, giving every appearance of lassitude. When he could be sure of being heard, he said, in his carefully enunciated tone, “What we’re talking about here in a secular age is a hunger for God. God or the Breast. You can have enough sex, Blanche, believe it or believe it not. You can never have enough of God. God’s the giant breast in the sky.”

  Only Teresa felt qualified to comment on these remarks. From her vantage point on the balcony, overlooking the square, she said, “It’s a divine dissatisfaction.”

  The man stretched his legs. “I wouldn’t put it like that, dear. More gross, quite honestly, than divine. Do you realize how much of every day is taken up with food, with the belly? The pursuit of food, the eating of food, the recovering from its after-effects? The stomach’s as much a tyrant as the genitals.”

  “Not in my case,” said Teresa, who was dieting.

  Taking a rein on herself, Blanche said in a low desperate voice, “I was a friend of his wife’s. I loved him then… Was it just a case of ‘can’t have?’ He looks so lovely. And he thinks I look lovely. And he’s good and pleasant to be with in bed. Isn’t pleasant better than good? The number of men I know who’re good in bed and nothing else. Good—and shits. Roy… Roy’s a decent man, and when I saw him again—”

  “Did that woman really eat her daughter or are you just tipsy and making it all up?”

  “If only he wasn’t so caught up with the past…” Blanche half-rose. She set her glass down unsteadily on the marble top of the table.

  “Christ!” she said. She sat down again, suddenly sober, suddenly bereft of words. Somewhere, a long way away, an evil thing had befallen her lover.

  3

  Bishops Linctus

  You don’t find it odd to discover gradually that you’re sort of running. Or more a jog-trot. You can see the legs going, and they’re yours. And the scrubby grass below your shoes, resilient, springing up again when you’ve passed. That’s not odd. But something’s odd.

  Imagine yourself in an art cinema. The movie begins without titles or proem. The opening shot is of some character walking or jogging across a featureless landscape. Photography: grainy, bleached. Camera: perhaps hand-held in an old-fashioned twentieth-century way.

  The sequence immediately holds your interest, although there’s little enough to see. Perhaps some kind of tribal memory comes back, if anyone believes in tribal memory—or anything else—any more. Our ancestors were great walkers, right back to the Ice Age and beyond. If you can walk along a glacier with bare feet, you deserve to succeed.

  Now imagine you’re not in a comfortable seat watching the movie. You are that jogging character. Only you’re not in a movie. You’re real, or what we label real for convenience, according to our limited sensory equipment. (Anyone who walks on a glacier with bare feet needs his head looking at…)

  Head… Yes, that’s still there…

  You’re not surprised even at that.

  Your life appears to have begun anew, and you’re progres
sing across what will turn out to be… a rather unappetizing stretch of England… Salisbury Plain. Salisbury Plain is a) flat, b) plain, c) cold, and d) preparing to receive sweeping gusts of rain. You register these facts one by one.

  But walking is no trouble. It’s everything else that’s trouble.

  Like how you got where you are. Like what happened. Like who you are. Even minor details like—where do you think you’re going?

  Night is closing in. It comes in early, rising out of the ground to meet the lowering cloud.

  So what do you do? You go on walking.

  There’s a landmark distantly to your right. Half-concealed by a fold in the ground stands a broken circle of stone monoliths. You imagine it’s the ruin of some bizarre Stone Age cathedral which was taken out in the war against the Neanderthals. It stands cobalt and unintelligible against the outlines of the over-praised English countryside.

  Cathedrals… Something stirs in the mind.

  Now wait…but you continue, limping as you walk, while darkness filters into the saucer of land like a neap tide. You continue, more slowly now, whispering words to yourself under your breath. You feel gradually more in command of yourself As if in confirmation, a line appears along the featureless wastes ahead. When you reach it, you find a fence, with a road on the far side of it. Darkness now gathers about you like an illness.

  When you have climbed the fence, you flounder through a ditch, to stand by the roadside. Almost no traffic passes along the road. You wait.

  You? You?

  Me. I.

  The dissociation of personality closes. A blurry zoom lens shrinks back into focus. He realizes he is one Roy Burnell.

  Or used to be. Something is missing.

  With these slow realizations comes the first angry drop of rain. He realizes that he needs shelter before anything.

  He knows he has a father, but cannot remember his name, or where he lives. As he stands there shivering, he recalls the loss of his mother. And was there someone else?

  He tries to thumb a lift from cars as they approach from either direction. Their headlights sweep over him. Past they swish in the increasing downpour, never pausing.

  Bastards.

  He remembers that word.

  A long while later, in hospital, Burnell is to remember the dream of the devil who bit his head off. It really happened. Someone stole part of his memory.

  At last, when the rain is dwindling, a car stops. A woman is driving. A man sits beside her in the passenger seat. It is an old car. She puts a big blunt face out of the window and asks him where he wants to go. Burnell says anywhere. They laugh and say that is where they are going. He climbs into the back of the car.

  All he can see is that the woman is heavy, middle-aged, and has a head of frizzy hair. The man might be her father. He is old, sharp-nosed, stoop-shouldered, wearing a cap. As the car roars on its way, the man turns stiffly and asks Burnell a few questions in a friendly way.

  Burnell wishes to be silent. He is cold and frightened, being reduced to near anonymity. He cannot frame any answers. He remembers he can’t remember a car crash.

  The couple fear he is a loony, and kick him out in the nearest village. He is inclined to agree with their judgment. Why can’t he remember how he came to be on Salisbury Plain?

  The rain has stopped. He stands where they dropped him, outside a row of cottages showing no signs of life. Prodding himself into action—he is tired now—he walks along the road, out of the village. It is pitch-dark. A wood fringes the road. The wood drips. He thinks he hears mysterious footsteps. He turns round and goes back to the village.

  A sign tells him he is in Bishops Linctus. A few widely spaced lights burn here and there. No one is about. He passes a Shell filling station, a builder’s yard, an EMV and video shop. Still it might be the Middle Ages.

  He reaches a pub called the Gun Dog. Its sign depicts a ferocious hound showing its teeth at a partridge. Burnell has no money in his pocket, and consequently is afraid to enter the pub. There are countries whose names he does not for the moment recall where one might enter a hostelry when down on one’s luck, and be treated in a considerate manner; he is not confident this would happen in England.

  He stands indecisively in the middle of the road.

  Unexpectedly, someone is standing close by. Burnell starts, and gives an exclamation of surprise. The silent newcomer is a young man in leather gear and high boots, with a shotgun of some kind tucked under his arm. Hearing Burnell exclaim, he backs away. He steps briskly past Burnell, to walk away along the road.

  After going no more than ten paces, he halts. Burnell stands where he is. The young man comes back, not too close, to inspect Burnell.

  “You OK, mate?”

  By the glow from the pub, Burnell sees a strange round head, on which sits a thin young face, twisted into seriousness, with fair eyebrows and stubble on the jaw. Also a bad case of acne.

  “Not too good. I may have been in a car crash.”

  The young man is guarded, his manner hardly friendly. He characterizes Burnell’s claim to have lost his memory as “all balls.” Nevertheless, after a few questions, he opines that his old ma will help.

  With that, he walks on, adopting a kind of swagger, looking back once to see that Burnell is following.

  Burnell follows. Little option but to follow. Head hanging, shoulders slumped. No idea what’s going on.

  Bishops Linctus street lighting stops where the road begins to curve upwards. Somewhere beyond the lighting stands a line of council houses, back from the road, with cars and lorries parked in front of them. The young man heads for the nearest house, where a light burns in the uncurtained front room.

  They push in through a recalcitrant back door, into a passage obstructed by a mountain bike. A sound of firing fills the house. The TV is on in the front room, from which emerges a woman shrieking, “Larry, Larry, you back?”

  “What’s it look like?” he replies.

  In close-up—she bringing a plump face close to Burnell’s—Larry’s mother is a well-cushioned little person in her early fifties, her lower quarters stuffed into jeans. The shriek was a protective device; the voice sinks back to a lower key when her son brushes past her and switches off the TV program.

  The woman immediately takes charge of Burnell, giving him the kitchen towel to dry himself on, and a pair of worker’s cords and shirt to wear. While he removes his wet clothes and dries himself as in a trance, she prepares him a cup of instant coffee, chattering all the while. As he drinks the coffee, she prepares him a slice of white bread, buttered and spread with thick honey. He eats it with gratitude, and is so choked with emotion he can only squeeze her hand.

  “Don’t worry, love. We know all about the bloody police in this house. Knock you about, did they?”

  The picture keeps going out of focus.

  Perhaps he has passed out from fatigue. Rousing, he finds he is sitting on the grubby kitchen floor. He looks up at a poster advertising a can of something called “Vectan Poudres de Tir, Highly Flammable.” He looks down at ten red-painted toenails protruding from gold sandals. A hand comes within his line of sight. A voice says, “Oops, dear, you OK? It’s the drink, is it? Terrible stuff. I don’t know what God was thinking of.”

  “Leave him alone, Ma!” roars Larry from the passage.

  As he is helped up, Burnell thinks he hears a bird singing.

  “Take no notice,” says Ma, almost whispering. “It’s just his manner. He’s a very nice quiet boy really.”

  Shock shot. Larry appears suddenly into the kitchen doorway, in a gunman’s crouch, both hands together in a shootist position, clasping an imaginary gun. “Bang, bang. Got you both.”

  Ma laughs, says to Burnell, “He’s daft.” Burnell wonders if events are registering on him, or whether he might still be running across an endless plain. A bird twitters in his head.

  He steadies himself against the sink, which is crammed with the remains of Indian take-aways. He cannot spea
k.

  Larry unlocks the door of the room at the rear of the house. A large notice on the door, painted in red paint, says “My Room. Keep Out. DANGER.” On it is a poster of Marilyn Monroe with a penciled-in moustache and teeth blackened, and a large photograph of howitzers firing in World War I.

  “You need a good night’s sleep, that’s what you need,” Ma tells him, looking concerned. She gives him a toffee. As Burnell chews the toffee, Larry sticks his head round the door of His Room and calls Burnell in. He locks the door from the inside.

  “Sleep here. It’s OK. Don’t listen to her. She’s nuts.”

  Burnell says nothing, chewing on the toffee. The sporting gun previously tucked under Larry’s arm keeps company with a large six-shooter on a box by the window. However, when Larry pulls a rug and cushion off his bed, throwing them on the floor, a semiautomatic rifle is revealed, snuggled among the blankets.

  A slow panning shot reveals the narrow room to be full of magazines about guns. They are piled up in corners and spill out of a half-closed cupboard. They are stacked under the bed among cartridge boxes. Used targets are wedged behind a strip of mirror: black outlines of men in bowler hats, their hearts shot out, macabre Magrittes.

  “Are you a gamekeeper?” Jaws automatically munching as he forms the question.

  “Work on Thorne’s farm. Sometimes I’m a brickie, aren’t I? Out of work. You can doss down there, right?”

  Doubtfully, Burnell settles on the floor. He knows nothing and feels miserable. He cannot remember if he met Larry before. He hopes that if so they are not related. Cousins. Anything.

  Something hard he recognizes as the muzzle of a gun is thrust into his ear. He laughs nervously. Looks up.

  “Any monkey business in the night and you get it, right?” Larry withdraws the weapon and shows the pistol to his guest, innocent in his grimy hand. “Look at this little beauty. You know what this is?”

  Larry kneels on the edge of his bed, glaring down at Burnell, who makes a feeble reply. Larry is not a great listener. He goes on without pausing for answers. “It’s a sweet little performer. I bet you never saw one like it. It’s a Makarov PSM. A Makarov PSM, illegal in this country, a KGB pistol, a Makarov PSM.” He pronounces the name like a lamb voicing its mother tongue. He removes the magazine from the gun to demonstrate eight rounds of a gleaming bottle-neck appearance. He makes a curious noise in the back of his throat. “See them rounds? Under an inch long. Know what they can do? Bust through body armor, OK? Good as .44 Magnum bullets. Blow a man’s guts out through his arse. Old KGB knew what it was doing. No kidding.”