The Wanting Seed

by Anthony Burgess

  'All the more reason why there's got to be a war,' said the driver, 'if we've been such a long time without one.'

  'But,' said Tristram, agitated, 'you've no conception what war was like. I've read books about the old wars. They were terrible, terrible. There were poison gases that turned your blood to water and bacteria that killed the seed of whole nations and bombs that smashed cities in a split second. All that's over. It's got to be over. We can't have all that again. I've seen photographs,' he shivered. 'Films, too. Those old wars were ghastly. Rape, looting, torture, arson, syphilis. Unthinkable. No, no, never again. Don't say things like that.'

  The driver, tilting his wheel gently, his shoulders jigging like a bad dancer's, sucked hard. 'I didn't mean that sort, mister. I meant, you know, fighting. Armies. One lot having a bash at another lot, if you see what I mean. One army facing another army, like it might be two teams. And then one lot shoots at another lot, and they go on shooting till somebody blows the whistle and they say, "This lot's won and this lot's lost." Then they dish out leave and medals and the tarts are all lined up waiting at the station. That's the sort of war I mean, mister.'

  'But who,' asked Tristram, 'would go to war with whom?'

  'Well,' said the driver, 'that would have to be sorted out, wouldn't it? Arrangements would sort of have to be made, wouldn't they? But, you mark my words, it's got to come.' The cargo behind him danced tinnily, jauntily, as they went over a hump bridge. 'A hero's death,' said the soldier suddenly with a sort of complacency. The battalion of tinned meat jingled applause, like some giant chestful of medals.

  Nine

  TRISTRAM got a lift in a Military Police van from Wigan to Standish, then the road was suddenly empty of traffic. He walked slowly and with some difficulty through the plenilunar night, his left foot giving him trouble - a thick seg and the shoe-sole worn to a neat hole. Still, he shogged along bravely, with quiet excitement trotting in front of him, its tongue out, and the night shogged with him towards morning. His feet suggested a rest at Leyland, but his heart would have none of that. On to dawn in Preston: a breather there, perhaps an eleemosynary breakfast, then on to his goal, three miles west. Morning and the town approached stealthily.

  What was that ringing noise? Frowning, Tristram poked his little fingers into his ears, agitating the wax with a deafening rumble. He automatically sniffed at the waxy finger-tip (the only pleasant odour of all that the body secreted), listening. That bell-noise came from the world, not his head: it clanged out of the town itself. Bells to welcome the pilgrim in? Nonsense. It was not bells, either: it was an electronic fabrication of bells - slow-pulsing from shaking loudspeakers, throwing up a metallic spray of harmonics, demented silver. Wondering, Tristram approached. He entered Preston in full morning and was swallowed by crowds and the jubilant clanging, crying to the strangers who surrounded him, 'What is all this? What's going on?' They laughed in answer, deaf, dumb, mouthing in the mad swirl of auricular metal. A shuddering bronze lid, which miraculously seemed to let in more light, had come down in silver over the township. People were moving towards the source of the mad angelic din; Tristram followed. It was like entering the very heart of noise, noise as ultimate reality.

  A grey freestone anonymous building - provincial architecture, no more than ten storeys - and loudspeakers flaring down from its roof. Tristram entered, jostled, out of the lemon sunlight, and inside the building opened his mouth at the vast cubic hollowness. Never in his life had he seen an interior so large. It could not be called a room - a hall, meeting-place, place of assembly; there must be a special word and he searched for it. It was an improvisation: the cells of the old block (flats or offices) had been shelled out; roomwalls had been knocked down, as jagged brick buttresses showed; the floor-ceilings of several storeys cleared, stripped, so that the eyes were shocked at the height. Tristram recognized an altar on a rostrum at the far end; rows of rough benches, people sitting waiting, kneeling praying. The appropriate terms began to creak back from his reading, as platoon, battalion had come back before in a context that, for some reason, seemed similar. Church. Congregation. 'You're oldin oop traffic, lad,' said a genial voice behind. Tristram took a, took a - what was the word? Took a pew.

  Priests, a plurality of them, marched burlily in with big fat candles, a platoon (no, a section) of boy-servitors. 'lntroibo ad altare Dei -' Mixed voices, a whole storey up, in a gallery at the rear of the building, replied in song: 'Ad Deum Qui laetificat juventutem meam.' This was some very special occasion. This was like playing chess with carved ivory horses and elephants, not with bits of shaped prison soap. "Alleluia" kept crashing into the liturgy. Tristram waited patiently for the Consecration, the eucharistic breakfast, but the grace before meat was very long.

  A heavy-lipped bull of a priest turned from the altar to the congregation, standing at the rostrum's edge, blessing the air. 'Brethren,' he said. A speech, an oration, an address, a sermon. 'This is Easter Day. This morning we celebrate the resurrection or rising-from-the-dead of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Crucified for preaching the kingdom of God and brotherhood of man, His dead weight dragged down from the cross and stamped in the earth - as weed is stamped or fire-ash - He yet rose on the third day in raiment glorious as the sun and moon and all the fires of the firmament. He rose to bear witness to the world that there is no death, that death is but appearance and not reality, that the seeming forces of death are but shadows and their prevalence but a prevalence of shadows.' The priest belched gently on a fasting stomach. 'He rose to extol life everlasting, not a whitelipped ghost-life in some tenebrose noosphere -' ('Ee,' said a woman behind Tristram) '- but a totality or unity of life in which the planets dance with the amrebre, the great unknown macrobes with the microbes that swirl in our bodies and the bodies of the beasts our fellows, all flesh is one and flesh is also corn, grass, barley. He is the sign, the eternal symbol, the perpetual recurrence made flesh; He is man, beast, corn, God. His blood also becomes our blood through its act of refreshing our sluggish warm red, coiling along its palpitating channels. His blood is not only the blood of man, beast, bird, fish; it is also the rain, the river, the sea. It is the ecstatically pumped seed of men and it is the flowing richness of the milk of the mothers of men. In Him we become one with all things, and He is one with all things and with us.

  'Today in England, today throughout the English-Speaking Union, we joyfully celebrate, with sackbut and psaltery and loud alleluias, the resurrection of the Prince of Life. Today, too, in far lands which in the barren past rejected the flesh and the blood of the Eternal Lifegiver, this His rising from the tomb is hailed with a joy like to our own, though under figures and names of outlandish meaning and heathenish sound.' The man to Tristram's right frowned at that sentence. 'For, though we call Him Jesus and the veritable Christ, yet is He beyond all names and above them, so that Christ re-arisen will hear Himself addressed in joy and worship as Thammuz or Adonis or Attis or Balder or Hiawatha, and to Him all is one as all names are one, as all words are one, as all life is one.' The preacher was silent for a space; spring coughs hacked out from the congregation. Then, with the irrelevance proper to a religious discourse, he cried with a main voice, 'Therefore, fear not. In the midst of death we are in life.'

  'Aaaargh, bloody nonsense!' called a voice from the rear. 'You can't bring the dead back, blast you, for all your fine talk!' Heads swivelled gratefully; there was a scuffle; arms flailed; Tristram could not see very well.

  'I think,' said the preacher, unperturbed, 'it would be better if my interrupter left. If he will not leave voluntarily perhaps he could be assisted to leave.'

  'Bloody nonsense! Whoring after false gods, God forgive your black heart!' And now Tristram could see who it was. He knew that moon-face, red with generous anger. 'My own children,' it yelled, 'sacrificed on the altar of Baal that you worship as the true God, God forgive you!' The big body, in its sack farmer's garments, was being pulled out fighting by struggling panting men, leaving the presence correctly backwards, its
arms pinned painfully behind it. 'God forgive the lot of you, for I never shall!'

  'Excuse me,' murmured Tristram, pushing out of his pew. Somebody had placed a gagging hand over his brother-in-law's retreating mouth. 'Bob,' came the muffled protest. 'Bob blasp be bop ob boo.' Shonny and his rough hard-breathing escort were already through the doorway. Tristram walked fast up the aisle. 'To resume,' the preacher resumed.

  Ten

  'So,' said Tristram hopelessly, 'they just took her away.'

  'And then,' said Shonny dully, 'we waited and waited, but they didn't come home. And then the next day we knew what had happened. Oh, God, God.' He made a big red plate of his hands and plopped the pudding of his head on to it, sobbing.

  'Yes, yes, terrible,' said Tristram. 'Did they say where they were taking her to? Did they say they were going back to London?'

  'I blame myself,' said Shonny's hidden head. 'I trusted God. It was the wrong God I was trusting, all these long years. No God who was good could let that happen, God forgive Him.'

  'All for nothing,' sighed Tristram. 'All that journey wasted.' His hand trembled round his glass. They were seated in a small shop that sold water barely touched by alc.

  'Mavis has been wonderful,' said Shonny, looking up, dripping with tears. 'Mavis took it like a saint or an angel. But I'll never be the same again, never. I tried telling myself that God knew why it had happened, that there was a divine reason for everything. I even came to mass this morning, ready to be like Job and to praise the Lord in the transport of my miseries. And then I saw. I saw it in that priest's fat face; I heard it in his fat voice. A false God has taken possession of them all.' He breathed in hard with a curious rattling noise like sea-dragged shingle. The few other drinkers (men in old clothes, not celebrating Easter) looked up.

  'You can have other children,' said Tristram. 'You still have your wife, your home, your work, your health. But what am I to do? Where can I go, who can I turn to?'

  Shonny glared at him evilly. There was scum round his lips and his chin was ill-shaven. 'Don't talk to me,' he said. 'You with your children that I've protected all these months at the risk of the lives of my whole family. You and your sly twins.'

  'Twins?' Tristram stared. 'Twins, did you say?'

  'With these hands,' said Shonny, and he presented them to the world, huge and hooked, 'I brought your twins to birth. And now I say: Better if I hadn't. Better if I'd let them shift for themselves, like little wild animals. Better if I'd strangled them and given them to your false greedy God with His lips dripping with blood, picking His teeth after His favourite accursed meal of little children. Then, perhaps, He would have left mine alone. Then, perhaps, He would have permitted them to come home from school unmolested, as on any other day, and let them live. Live,' he shouted. 'Live, live, live.'

  'I'm sorry,' said Tristram. 'You know I'm sorry.' He paused. 'Twins,' he said in wonder. And then, vigorously, 'Where did they say they were going? Did they say they were going back to my brother in London?'

  'Yes, yes, yes, I suppose so. I suppose they said something like that. It doesn't matter, anyway. Nothing matters any more.' He sucked at his glass without relish. 'My whole world's shattered,' he said. 'I have to build it up again, searching for a God I can believe in.'

  'Oh,' cried Tristram in sudden irritation, 'don't be so sorry for yourself. It's people like you who've made the kind of world you say you no longer believe in. We were all safe enough in that old liberal society.' He was talking of less than a year back. 'Hungry, but safe. Once you kill the liberal society you create a vacuum for God to rush into, and then you unleash murder and fornication and cannibalism. And,' said Tristram, his heart suddenly sinking, 'you believe it's right for man to go on sinning for ever, because that way you justify your. belief in Jesus Christ,' for he saw that whatever government was in power he would always be against it.

  'That's not right,' said Shonny, with surprising reasonableness. 'Not it at all. There are two Gods, you see. They get mixed up, and it's hard for us to find the right one. Like,' he said, 'those twins, Derek and Tristram she called them. She got them mixed up when they were naked. But it's better to have it that way than to have no God at all.'

  'Then what the hell are you complaining about?' snarled Tristram. The best of both worlds, as always; women always got the best of both worlds.

  'I'm not complaining,' said Shonny, with frightening meekness. 'I'm going to put my trust in the real God. He'll avenge my poor dead children.' Then he clamped the two half-masks of his hands, dirty hands, over his fresh sobbing. 'You can keep your other God, your other filthy God.'

  'I don't believe in either,' Tristram found himself saying. 'I'm a liberal.' Shocked, he said, 'I don't really mean that, of course. What I mean is -'

  'Leave me to my misery,' cried Shonny. 'Get out and leave me alone.'

  Embarrassed, Tristram mumbled, 'I'm going. I'd better start my return journey. They say there are trains running now. They say the State airlines are functioning again. So,' he said, 'she called them Tristram and Derek, did she? That was very clever.'

  'You have two children,' said Shonny, removing his hands from his blear eyes. 'I have none. Go on, get to them.'

  'The fact is,' said Tristram, 'the fact is that I've no money. Not a solitary tanner. If you could lend me, say, five guineas or twenty crowns or something like that -'

  'You'll get no money from me.'

  'A loan, that's all. I'll repay it as soon as I get a job. It won't be long, I promise.'

  'Nothing,' said Shonny, making an ugly mouth like a child. 'I've done enough for you, haven't I? Haven't I done enough?'

  'Well,' said Tristram, puzzled, 'I don't know. I suppose you must have, if you say so. I'm grateful, anyway, very grateful. But you can see, surely, that I've got to get back to London and it's too much to ask me, surely, to return as I came, walking and cadging lifts. Look at this left shoe. I want to get there quickly.' He feebly banged the table with both fists. 'I want to be with my wife. Can't you see that?'

  'All my life,' said Shonny sombrely, 'I've been giving, giving, giving. People have put upon me. People have taken and then laughed behind my back. I've given too much in my time. Time and work and money and love. And what have I ever got in return? Oh, God, God.' He choked.

  'Be reasonable. Just a loan. Two or three crowns, say. I am, after all, your brother-in-law.'

  'You're nothing to me. You're just the husband of my wife's sister, that's all. And a damned bad lot you've turned out to be, God forgive you.'

  'Look here, I don't like that. You've no call to say that sort of thing.'

  Shonny folded his arms, as if ordered to by a teacher, and shut his lips tight. Then, 'Nothing from me,' he said. 'Go somewhere else for your money. I've never cared for you or for your type of person. You and your Godless liberalism. And cheating, too. Having children on the sly. She should never have married you. I always said that, and Mavis said the same. Go on, get out of my sight.'

  'You're a mean bastard,' said Tristram.

  'I am what I am,' said Shonny, 'as God is what He is. You'll get no help from me.'

  'You're a damned hypocrite,' said Tristram with something like glee, 'with your false "Lord have mercy on us" and "Glory be to God in the highest". High-sounding blasted religious phrases and not a scrap of real religion in you.'

  'Get out,' said Shonny. 'Go quietly.' The bald waiter by the bar was biting his nails anxiously. 'I don't want to throw you out.'

  'Anybody would think you owned the damned place,' said Tristram. 'I hope you remember this some day. I hope you remember that you refused help when it was desperately needed.'

  'Go on, go. Go and find your twins.'

  'I'm going,' said Tristram. He got up and plastered his rage with a grin. 'You'll have to pay for the alc, anyway,' he said. 'That's one thing you'll have to pay for.' He made a vulgar schoolboy's noise and went out in tearing anger. He stood on the pavement for a moment, hesitant, then, deciding to turn right, he caught, trudgin
g on his way, through the smeared window of the cheap shop, a last glimpse of poor Shonny with his pudding head shaking in his hands.

  Eleven

  TRISTRAM walked hungry and wondering what to do, rage still quaking inside, through the sunny Easter Preston streets. Should he stand in the gutter and beg, sing with his hand out? He was dirty and ragged enough for a beggar, he knew, gaunt, bearded, his hair a crinkly tangle. Someone out of ancient history or myth had been that not too unhappy teacher of Social Studies of less than a year ago, groomed, neat, eloquent, home to eat synthelac pudding prepared by a personable wife, the shiny black news spinning sedately on its wall-spindle. Things had not been too bad, really: just enough food, stability, a sufficiency of money, stereoscopic television on the bedroom ceiling. He choked back a dry sob.

  Not far from a bus-terminal - red single-deckers filling up with passengers for Bamber Bridge and Chorley - Tristram's nostrils dilated at a briskly wind-borne smell of stew. It was a coarse charity kind of aroma - greasy metal and meat-fat mitigated by herbs - but he slavered lavishly, sucking the saliva back in as he followed his nose. In a side-street the smell blew out richly at him, heartening as low comedy, and he saw both men and women queueing outside a double-fronted shop whose windows had been rendered opaque with whitewash whorls like amateur reproductions of Brancusi's portrait of James Joyce. A metal plaque above the door said, white on scarlet, WD North-West District Communal Feeding Centre. God bless the army. Tristram joined the line of vagrants like himself - dusty-haired, clothes creased with sleep, fish-eyed with disappointment. One jockey of a wretched man kept doubling up as though punched in the guts, complaining monotonously of the belly-warch. A very thin woman with filthy grey hair stood upright in pathetic dignity, above these people, above begging except absent-mindedly. A quite young man sucked with desperate force at his mouth without teeth. Tristram was suddenly nudged by a jocular male bag of rags, smelling powerfully of old dog. 'What fettle?' he asked of Tristram. And then he said, nodding towards the greasy stew-aroma, 'Oo's getten chip-pan on.' Nobody else smiled. A young shapeless woman with hair like teased wool said to a bowed and sunken Oriental, 'Ad to ditch kid on't way, like. Couldn't carry im no more.' Wretched wanderers.