The Wanting Seed

by Anthony Burgess

  At length the lorry stopped, and there was a grinding finality of brakes, an opening and slamming of the doors of the driver's cabin. A noise of unslotting, a chainy rattle, and then great daylight blew in like a wind. 'Out,' said a carbined corporal, pock-marked Micronesian. 'Look here,' said Tristram, getting out, 'I want to register the strongest possible protest about this. I demand that I be allowed to telephone Commissioner Foxe, my brother. There's been a ghastly mistake.' 'In,' said a constable, and Tristram was shoved with the rest through a doorway. Forty-odd storeys dove into heaven over their heads. 'You lot in here,' said a sergeant. 'Thirty-five to a cell. Plenty of room for all, you horrible great antisocial things, you.' 'I protest,' protested Tristram. 'I'm not going in there,' going in. 'Ah, shut it,' said a worker. 'With pleasure,' said the sergeant. Three bolts slammed in on them and, for good measure, a key ground round in a rusty ward.

  Seven

  BEATRICE-JOANNA packed one bag only, there not being much to pack. This was no age of possessions. She said good-bye to the bedroom, her eyes moistening at her last sight of the tiny wall-cot that had been Roger's. Then, in the living-room, she told out all her cash: five guineanotes, thirty crowns, odd septs, florins and tanners. Enough. There was no time to let her sister know, but Mavis had often said, often written, 'Now, come any time. But don't bring that husband of yours with you. You know Shonny can't stand him.' Beatrice-Joanna smiled at the thought of Shonny, then cried, then pulled herself together. She also pulled the main switch and the hum of the refrigerator ceased. It was a dead flat now. Guilty? Why should she feel guilty? Tristram had told her to get out, and she was getting out. She wondered again who had told him, how many knew. Perhaps she would never see Tristram again. The small life within her said, 'Act, don't think. Move. I'm all that counts.' She would, she thought, be safe in Northern Province; it would be safe. She could think of no other obligation than to this, the single inch of protest, weighing thirty-odd grains, the cells dividing again and again in protest, blasts of protest - epi, meso, hypo. Tiny life protesting at monolithic death. Away.

  It was starting to rain, so she put on her waterproof, a thin skin like a mist. There was dried blood on the pavement, needles of rain pricking it to make it flow, if only down the gutter. The rain came from the sea and stood for life. She walked briskly into Froude Square. The red-lit underground station entrance milled with people, red-lit like devils of the old mythical hell, silent, chunnering, giggling, sped singly or in pairs down the grumbling escalator. Beatrice-Joanna bought her ticket from a machine, dove down to the aseptic white catacombs where winds rushed out of tunnels, and boarded a tube-train to Central London. It was a swift service and would get her there in less than half an hour. Next to her an old woman champed and champed, talking to herself, her eyes closed, saying aloud at intervals, 'Doris was a good girl, a good girl to her mother, but the other one -' Preston, Patcham, Pangdean. Passengers left, passengers boarded. Pyecombe. The old woman alighted, mumbling, 'Doris.' 'A pie was what they used to eat,' said a pale fat mother in powder-blue. Her child cried.

  'Hungry, that's his trouble,' she said. And now the legs of the journey grew longer. Albourne. Hickstead. Bolney. Warninglid. At Warninglid a scholarly-looking man with a stringy neck boarded, sitting next to Beatrice-Joanna to read, puffing like a tortoise, Dh Wks v Wlym Shkspr. He unwrapped a synthechoc bar and began to chew, puffing. The child renewed his crying. Handcross. Pease Pottage. 'Pease pottage was something else they used to eat,' said the mother. Crawley, Horley, Salfords. Nothing edible there, Redhill. At Redhill the scholar alighted and three members of the Population Police came aboard. They were young men, subalterns, well set-up, their metal ashine and their black unmaculated by hairs, scurf or food-droppings. They examined the women passengers insolently, as with eyes expert at burrowing to illegal pregnancies. Beatrice-Joanna blushed, wishing the journey were over. Merstham, Caterham, Coulsdon. It soon would be. She pressed her hands over her belly as though its cellulating inmate were already leaping with audible joy. Purley, Croydon, Thornton Heath, Norwood. The police officers alighted. And now the train went purring into the deep black heart of the immemorial city. Dulwich, Camberwell, Central London. And soon Beatrice-Joanna was on the local line to the North-West Terminus.

  She was shocked at the number of grey and black police that infested the noisy station. She joined a queue in the booking-hall. Officers of both forces sat at long tables barring the way to the bank of booking-guichets. They were smart, pert, clipped.

  'Identity-card, please.' She handed it over. 'Destination?'

  'State Farm NW313, outside Preston.'

  'Purpose of trip?'

  She fell easily into the rhythm. 'Social visit.'

  'Friends?'

  'Sister.'

  'I see. Sister.' A dirty word, that. 'Duration of visit?'

  'I can't say. Look here, why do you want to know all this?'

  'Duration of visit?'

  'Oh, perhaps six months. Perhaps longer.' How much should she tell them? 'I'm leaving my husband, you see.'

  'Hm. Hm. Check on this passenger, will you?' A constable-clerk copied from her identity-card on to a buff form, official. Meanwhile another young woman was in trouble. 'I tell you I'm not pregnant,' she kept saying. A gold-haired thin-lipped policewoman in black began to pull her to a door blazoned MEDICAL OFFICER. 'We'll soon see,' she said. 'We'll soon know all about that, shan't we, dear?'

  'But I'm not,' cried the young woman. 'I tell you I'm not.'

  'There,' said Beatrice-Joanna's interrogator, handing back her stamped carnet. He had a pleasant prefect's face on which grimness sat like a bogey-mask. 'Too many illeg pregs trying to escape to the provinces. You wouldn't be trying anything like that, would you? Your card says you've got one child, a son. Where is he now?'

  'Dead.'

  'I see. I see. Well, that's that then, isn't it? Off you go.' And Beatrice-Joanna went to book her single ticket to the north.

  Police at the barriers, police patrolling the platform. A crowded train (nuclear-propelled). Beatrice-Joanna sat down, already exhausted, between a thin man so stiff that his skin seemed to be armour and a very small woman whose legs dangled like a very big doll's. Opposite was a check-suited man with a coarse comedian's face, sucking desperately at a false molar. A small girl, open-mouthed as with adenoid growths, surveyed Beatrice-Joanna from head to foot, foot to head, in a strict slow rhythm. A very fat young woman glowed like a deliberate lamp, her legs so tree-like that they seemed to be growing out of the floor of the compartment. Beatrice-Joanna closed her eyes. Almost at once a dream leaped on to her: a grey field under a thundery sky, cactus-like plants groaning and swaying, skeletal people collapsing with their black tongues hanging out, then herself involved - with some bulky male form that shut out the scene - in the act of copulation. Loud laughter broke out and she awoke fighting. The train was still in the station; her fellow-travellers stared at her with (except for the adenoidal girl) only a little curiosity. Then-as if that dream had been an obligatory rite before departure - they began to ease out, leaving the grey and black police behind.

  Eight

  'WHAT will they do to us?' asked Tristram. His eyes had grown used to the dark and could see that the roan next to him was the cross-eyed Mongol who, ages ago in the rebellious street, had announced his name as Joe Blacklock. Of the other prisoners, some squatted like miners - there were no seats - and others propped up the walls. One old man, formerly phlegmatic, had become possessed of a fit of excitement and had gripped the bars, crying to the corridor, 'I left the stove on. Let me get home and turn it off. I'll come straight back, honest I will,' and now lay exhausted on the cold flags.

  'Do to us?' said Joe Blacklock. 'There's nothing laid down, far as I know. Far as I know, they let some out and keep others in. That's right, isn't it, Frank?'

  'Ringleaders gets what for,' said Frank, gaunt, tall, gormless. 'We all said to 'Arry it was waste of time. Shouldn't never have done it. Look where it's got us.
Look where it'll get him.'

  'Who?' asked Tristram. 'Where?'

  'Strike-leader he calls himself. He'll do hard labour for a bit. Might be worse than that, what with things getting tougher all round.' He made a gun of his hand and levelled it at Tristram. 'As it might be yourself,' he said. 'Bang bang.'

  'It was nothing to do with me,' said Tristram for the thirtieth time. 'I just got caught up in the crowd. It's all a mistake, I keep telling you.'

  'That's right. You tell them that when they come for you.' Frank then went into the corner to micturate. The whole cell stank cosily of urine. A middle-aged man with grey chick-down on his dome, wild-looking like a lay-preacher, came over to Tristram and said:

  'You'll convict yourself soon as you open your mouth, mister. Bless your heart and soul, they'll know you for an intellectual soon as you walk in there. I reckon you've been real brave in one way or another, sticking up for the workers. You'll get your reward when better times come, you mark my words.'

  'But I wasn't,' almost wept Tristram. 'I didn't.'

  'Ah,' said a voice in a corner, 'I heareth footsteps, verily I dost, methinks.' The corridor light was switched on, raw as an egg, and boots clamped towards the cell. From the floor the old man pleaded, 'I only want to turn it off. I won't be gone long.' The cell-bars, dead black against the new light, grinned frankly at them all. Two greyboys, young and thuggish, armed, grinned in between the grinning bars. The bolts shot out, the key ground round, the cell-door clanged open. 'Right,' said one of the greyboys, a lance-jack, shuffiing a deck of identity cards. 'I'm giving these out, back, see? Them I give them to can skedaddle and are not to be naughty boys no more. Right. Aaron, Aldiss, Barber, Collins, Chung -' 'Now what the hell have I done wrong?' said Joe Blacklock. '- Davenport, Dilke, Mohamed Daud, Dodds, Endore, Evans -' The men came eagerly grabbing and were pushed out roughly to freedom. '- Fair-brother, Franklin, Gill, Hackney, Hamidin -' 'There must be some mistake,' cried Tristram. 'I'm an F.' '- Jones, Lindsay, Lowrie -' The cell was emptying fast. '- Mackintosh, Mayfield, Morgan, Norwood, O'Connor -' 'I'll be back,' said the old man, trembling, taking his card, 'as soon as I've turned it off. Thanks, lads.' '- Paget, Radzinowicz, Smith, Snyder, Taylor, Tucker, Ucuck, Vivian, Wilson, Wilson, Wilson. That's the lot. Who are you, chum?' asked the greyboy of Tristram. Tristram told him. 'Right, you're to stay here, you are.' 'I demand to see the man in charge,' demanded Tristram. 'I demand that I be allowed to contact my brother. Let me phone my wife. I shall write to the Home Secretary.' 'No harm in writing,' said the greyboy. 'Perhaps writing will keep you quiet. You do that, chum. You write.'

  Nine

  'WELL,' boomed Shonny, 'glory be to God in the highest, look who it is. My own litde sister-in-law, God bless us and keep us, not looking a day older than when I saw her last, and that must be all of three years ago. Come in, come in, and highly welcome.' He peered suspiciously out, saying, 'I mean no harm to him, mind, but I hope you haven't brought that horrible man with you, seeing as there's something in the very look of the man that makes my hackles rise and sets my teeth on edge.' Beatrice-Joanna shook her head, smiling. Shonny was something out of the fabulous past - open, direct, honest, virile, with a burnt coarse humorous moon-face, surprised ice-blue eyes, a simian upper lip, a lower lip that drooped fleshily, big-bodied in sack-like farmer's garb. 'Mavis,' he called, 'Mavis,' and Mavis appeared in the tiny hallway - six years older than Beatrice-Joanna, with the same cider hair, speck-brown eyes and lavish limbs, bathycolpous.

  'I didn't have time to let you know,' said Beatrice-Joanna, kissing her sister. 'I left in rather a hurry.'

  'A good place to leave in a hurry,' said Shonny, picking up her bag, 'that great horrible metropolis, God send it bad dreams.'

  'Poor little Roger,' said Mavis, her arm round her sister, leading her to the living-room. 'Such a shame.' The room was not much bigger than the one in the Foxe fiat, but it seemed to breathe space and oxygen. Shonny said:

  'Before we go any further, we'll have a drink of something.' He opened a trap-door to disclose a platoon of bottles. 'Something you'd never buy at twenty crowns the noggin in that benighted carcinoma you've left behind, God blast it.' He held up a bottle to the electric light. 'Plum wine of my own making,' he said. 'Wine-making's supposed to be forbiden like a lot of other wholesome and God-fearing things, but the hell. with the lot of the little-souled law-making dung-beetles, Christ have mercy on them.' He poured. 'Take that in your right hand and say after me,' he ordered. They drank. 'Wait,' said Shonny. 'What is it we drink to?'

  'A lot of things,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'Life. Freedom. The sea. Us. Something I'll tell you about later.'

  'We'll have a glass for each of those,' said Shonny. He beamed. 'Nice to have you with us,' he said.

  Shonny was a Pancelt, one of the rare survivors of the Celtic Union that, in voluntary exodus, had left the British Isles and, wave after wave, settled in Armorica nearly a century before. In Shonny was a heartening stew of Manx, Glamorgan, Shetland, Ayrshire and County Cork, but this, as Shonny was hot in pointing out, could not be called miscegenation. Fergus, the Moses of the Union, had taught that the Celts were one people, their language one language, their religion fundamentally one. He had wrung the doctrine of the Messiah's second coming out of Catholicism, Calvinistic Methodism, Presbyterianism: church, kirk and chapel were one temple of the imminent Lord. Their mission was, in a world whose Pelagianism was really Indifferentism, to cherish the Christian flame, as once before in face of the Saxon hordes.

  'We've been praying, you know,' said Shonny, pouring out more wine for the ladies, 'though, of course, that's illegal, too. They used to leave us alone in the old days, but now they've got these infernal police on the job, spying and arresting, just like in the ancient penal days of sacred memory. We've had mass here a couple of times. Father Shackel, God bless and help the poor man, was picked up in his own shop the other day by some of these simperers with guns and lipstick - Father Shackel's a seedsman by trade-and taken off we don't know where. And yet, and this the poor benighted imbeciles can't or won't realize, we've been offering the sacrifice for the State's own good. We're all going to starve, God bless us, if we don't pray for forgiveness for our blasphemous ways. Sinning against the light, denying life. The way things are going is being sent as a divine judgment on the lot of us.' He tossed off a beaker of plum wine and smacked his great meaty lips.

  'They've kept on cutting the rations,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'They don't say why. There've been demonstrations in the streets. Tristram got mixed up in one of those. He was drunk at the time. I think the police must have taken him off. I hope he's going to be all right.'

  'Well,' said Shonny, 'I don't wish him any real harm. Drunk, was he? There may be some good in him after all.'

  'And how long do you propose to stay with us?' asked Mavis.

  'I suppose I might as well tell you now as later,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'I hope you're not going to be shocked or anything. I'm pregnant.'

  'Oh,' said Mavis.

  'And,' said Beatrice-Joanna, 'I'm glad I'm pregnant. I want to have the baby.'

  'We'll certainly drink to that,' roared Shonny. 'Damn the consequences, say I. A gesture, that's what it is, keeping the flame going, saying mass in the cellar. Good girl.' He poured more wine.

  'You want to have the baby here?' said Mavis. 'It's dangerous. It's not something you can keep hidden for long. It's something you ought to think about very carefully, things being as they are these days.'

  'It's the will of God,' cried Shonny. 'Go forth and multiply. So that little man of yours has still got some life in him, eh?'

  'Tristram doesn't want it,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'He told me to get out.'

  'Does anybody know you've come here?' asked Mavis.

  'I had to tell the police at Euston. I said I was just coming on a visit. I don't think they'll do anything about it. There's nothing wrong with coming on a visit.'

  'A pretty long visit,' said Mavis. 'And there's the question of roo
m. The children are away at the moment, staying with Shonny's Aunt Gertie in Cumnock. But when they come back -'

  'Now, Mavis,' said Beatrice-Joanna, 'if you don't want me to stay, tell me straight. I don't want to be a burden and a nuisance.'

  'You won't be either,' said Shonny. 'We can fix you up, if need be, in one of the outhouses. A greater mother than you gave birth in a -'

  'Oh, stop that sentimentality,' scolded Mavis. 'That's the sort of thing that turns me against religion sometimes. If you're determined,' she said to her sister, 'really determined, well, we must just go ahead and hope for better times soon. I know how you feel, don't think I don't. Our family's always been very strong on motherhood. We must just hope for more sensible times to come again, that's all.'

  'Thank you, Mavis,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'I know there'll be a lot of problems - registration and rations and so on. There's time enough to think of those things.'

  'You've come to the right place,' said Shonny. 'My veterinary training will come in very handy, God bless you. Many's the litter I've helped to bring into the world.'

  'Animals?' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'You don't mean to say you have animals?'

  'Battery hens,' said Shonny gloomily, 'and our old sow Bessie. Jack Beare over at Blackburn has a boar which he hires out. It's all supposed to be illegal, may the Holy Trinity curse them, but we have managed to eke out our shameful diet with a bit of pig-meat. Everything's in a shocking state,' he said, 'and nobody seems able to understand it at all. This blight that seems to be sweeping the world, and the hens won't lay, and Bessie's last farrow so sickly with some queer internal growth, vomiting worms and all, I had to put them out of their misery. There's a curse settling on us, God forgive us all, with our blaspheming against life and love.'

  'Talking about love,' said Mavis, 'is it all over between you and Tristram?'

  'I don't know,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'I've tried to worry about him, but somehow I can't. It seems I've got to concentrate all my love now on something that hasn't even been born. I feel as though I'm being taken over and used. But I don't feel unhappy about it. Rather the opposite.'