Inner Circle (16 page)

Now he was probably whirling in the crowds, a barrel with a turret, set in this precious jewel, this multitudinous England. No matter what might yet befall Leeds and his complaint, I presumed him to be a returnable loss.

Meanwhile, I seemed to have regained my central position; I had a smallish circle with two wives and a baby, no male intruders, and giant trees formed our natural line of defence. The boxes had withdrawn from the Safety Zone altogether; the warning signs lay either broken or buried in the sand; the domes ceased to provide us with food outside their range. We were, in fact, on our own.

It amused me, while resting in the shade of the cedar, to think that the Safety Zone had reversed its original meaning and become a safe place, after all. I experienced a curious sense of freedom, limited by the zonal area and yet unlimited in the new growth.

The two black seeds had stirred a revolt under the surface. They must have attracted bits of matter from the deeper layers, and cleansed them of lifeless dust. New roots groped their way towards the soil, thin, timid and yet obedient to the instinct that pushed them up.

Rain was our food taster; she walked about under her trees, she walked along the seashore, she bent over green wisps sprouting from the earth, she buried her fingers in the moist patches probing the sand for mushrooms, real mushrooms juicy with real rain. We ate whatever she chose for us; we often had pains twisting the bowels and would retch the new food out with more pain. But slowly, day after day, we were acquiring the knowledge and the need of natural nourishment. And I liked drinking fresh rain-water from Rain’s cupped hands. I also desired her, because now she had cedar fragrance on her skin and the embracing warmth of sea waves in her touch and voice.

‘September wants you,’ she told me when I openly asked her to join her body with mine. ‘She is the mother of many children to come.’

‘Why not you, Rain?’ I embraced her, breathing in the fragrance of growth which she absorbed from the air of this safe Safety Zone. ‘You are also my wife.’ Then I added meekly in a whisper: ‘My first wife.’

‘I know, Dover. But now I stand within two generations, surrounded by trees born in my sign and by men born in the sign of September.’

‘Rain in the centre of a double circle.’

‘You might call it that, Dover. It has the roundness which needs no sides.’

But Rain neither played the part of a priestess nor suggested by her behaviour that our legs and bellies rubbed off purity from love each time they met in an act. On the contrary, she encouraged September to invite my desires, she taught her postures and signs so that her body would be as flexible as ten women together displaying love to a man.

‘Remember, remember, you held my head, September,’ she said and smiled. ‘I will hold yours today and see love with your own eyes.’

Rain knelt and drew September’s head to her breasts; she told her to embrace my neck with her legs and September did that, staring at me until Rain closed her eyes. It was Rain’s mouth speaking the caresses of September, and it was September’s distance under her shut eyelids which ended deep between the limbs of Rain. Linked together, they did possess me both with one body and one awareness.

‘We are not jealous of each other,’ Rain said after the act, and September confirmed this with a kiss between the breasts. ‘Why should Leeds or Joker matter to you, Dover? We are all sharers of the same beginning, chosen perhaps by the child tree, perhaps tossed about by coincidence.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind Leeds. He has far less power than I thought.’

‘What is power?’ asked September. To which a quick answer came. It was visual and suspended like a threat. Along the line where the clouds seemed to be edged with the colours of the domes, a winding script appeared. It resembled the characters inscribed on the rock, which Sailor had called Chinese, but soon the script loosened and shaped itself into large letters.

Contaminated area below. Beware of trees.

The letters flickered in red, in green and violet, and when they became red again, they were suddenly switched off, and I saw the nearest domes intensify their colours.

‘They’re coming this way. And they will drop nice flakes, mium, mium.’ The

‘mium’ was a marital borrowing from Leeds. September always welcomed the sight of approaching domes, for she thought and dreamt of food since the days of her pregnancy.

‘They look pointed and sharp: I said to Rain, expecting that she would be able to explain.’

‘They are coming down: Rain answered. ‘No, they’re going up again.’

‘It’s a new attack on us. Leeds went to report, he’s their informer.’

‘No, Dover, they are informed all the time. They don’t need Leeds. The domes won’t attack us.’

‘And why not, Rain?’

‘Because they’re coming to destroy my trees.’

At this moment the pointed edge of the green dome stood at the height of the cedar. It could cut off its crown in one slicing motion.

‘Rain, the cedar!’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Let’s make the cedar one of us. He is one of us.’

And we encircled the tree and moved around it, faster and faster. Then Rain told us to jump whenever we completed a new circle. We jumped and ran, and both motions created a dance. Our arms felt shorter as the trunk thickened, but our ears heard better and higher, up to the thudding noise at the top of the tree.

With one big knock, the cedar pierced the green dome and it burst, not into pieces, but into colours. They seemed to cascade through the twigs and the needles. When the broken colours dispersed or melted on the ground, I heard birds. The dome like a huge cage released them into the clouds. Then we saw a monkey shape on a thick bough. It could speak, however, and said peevishly:

‘What a brutish tree! It nearly split my bottom.’ And by his bottom we recognized him at once.

Cousin Leeds was climbing down.

3

‘Poetically speaking’—this was certainly a new beginning for Leeds—‘this is the cat of heaven. No, September dear, you shouldn’t call him the skycat, it’s not seemly. I mean once you’ve been up there. Puss, puss, puss. Here he is.’

‘Come to me, cat,’ Rain said and the cat sat on her foot. It was black, sleepy and purring with luck.

The cat must have climbed down after the birds or after Leeds, who was dotted with their droppings. For us the cat was indeed a fabulous creature, an exile from heaven.

I observed Leeds while he talked: much of his prodigious belly had subsided. Either this was the result of his mislodged complaint or he had slimmed rapidly during his climb down.

‘Did you see the skymen, Leeds? And, Leeds, what did they look like?’

September had a wife’s right to question an absentee husband.

‘Well. . . .’ I knew that ‘well’ of Leeds followed by a thoughtful pause. He was going to be statistically evasive; figures, percentages, differentials, but nothing concrete.

‘Well, you might ask whether likeness, any likeness, comes into your question to start with. Like, but like what? what being our operative differential. Is, for instance, number two like two in two thousand and twenty-two, or is it rather unlike two in the two-two-two context? Incidentally, what I am about to say may be of some relevance: there are two skies. Strange that I should have been going on like that about two and twos. Yes, the second sky can roughly be described as a sky above or below the first sky. It depends on how you apply the optical calculus. On the average, a middle-aged inhabitant of this island—and middle-aged we all are for obvious reasons—well—as I was saying. . . .’

‘Leeds,’ I interrupted him, ‘reality precedes similarity. Do the skymen exist at all?

Answer yes or no.’

‘They do and they don’t, you see. It’s the way the surface people think of them in these overcrowded conditions. I’ve heard rumours, though.’

‘What rumours, Leeds?’ I wouldn’t let him wriggle out.

‘Well—it is tentatively suggested that there are three skymen only: one with a beard, the other some kind of bird, and the third is beardless and birdless, a skywoman probably.’

‘To whom did you present your complaint?’

‘My complaint! Oh, that. I went to Durham, got a lift up to the sky, and there I pressed first a button, then a knob, then a button on a knob, and finally a magnetic rail whisked me a few miles to a spot where I had to speak into a microphone. I recorded my complaint, got a receipt, heard it played back, liked the recording very much, and that was that.’

‘Leeds,’ I said, ‘there is no such place as Durham.’

‘There was, my dear fellow, look at some old map.’

‘Who gave you a lift to the sky then?’

‘A lift, of course. Don’t you know what a lift is! A thing whizzing up, on rails too, but fixed vertically. It’s all quite easy, really.’

‘And the traffic shadows we used to see through the domes! Tell us about them.’

September was curious and willing to believe everything Leeds chose to say.

‘Rails, my dear, magnetic rails, and they cling to your feet while they transport you from knob to knob. Amazing how simply that sky-zone is run, I mean the other side of the domes. Nothing but knobs. A few birds here and there, and. . . .’ He paused and scratched his neck.

‘And the cat,’ Rain whispered for him.

‘He was miaowing, though, all the time, miaowing to be let out. You know what cats are.’ Then he quickly changed the subject. ‘I must tell you, cousins, I was appointed interim supervisor of emergency evacuation, should such an emergency arise. Again it’s this frightful overcrowding, you know, especially now that the Safety Zones have had to be considerably widened. Why, you may ask. Because of these blasted trees. They make the place look rather dark, don’t they? So unhygienic, too.’ Leeds sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose with disapproval and surveyed the white clouds above the cedar.

‘Have you seen my Joker anywhere?’ September asked.

‘A brave lad, but somewhat reckless. Fancy plunging into the Underground at a time when it was being flooded. Which reminds me. Down there they’ve already had an emergency evacuation. At least twenty train-loads of adolescents, all senior age group fortunately, had to be surfaced in a hurry. I saw the mess and the bulge. From the lift.

You couldn’t squeeze in your little finger anywhere between Durham and Dundee. A population bulge at the rate of seven surfacing heads per second. Poor Joker, he probably got stuck half-way down when the big pushup started.’

From the direction of the sea came a boy with dark hair, and Leeds, much intrigued, put on the airs of an interim supervisor. He gave the boy an eyeful of attention.

‘Too young to be here. They surfaced him by mistake. What is he holding in his hands?’

‘Fish,’ said the boy. And September echoed him with the gayest childlike laughter I ever heard from her lips.

‘What’s so funny?’ Leeds stopped being an interim supervisor.

‘You, Leeds. It’s our child. He grew up so fast in the first week that I had to feed him with stalks, roots, bulbs, anything which the earth was growing at the same time.’

‘Still, he’s much too young to be here.’ Then Leeds muttered half-hopefully:

‘He’s called after me, I presume?’

‘No, Leeds,’ I said. ‘His name is Sky because he was the first to be born under the open sky.’ I sounded more solemn than I intended.

‘Really, Dover, you should have waited for my return. Anyway, he’s far too young to have a name of his own. A temporary number would have done just as well.

Really, Dover, I am surprised at you.’

My turn to be surprised at Leeds came a week later. He said he didn’t feel very well. He had run out of the emergency supply of flakes, the sea air didn’t agree with him, he was putting on weight, and each tree shade annoyed him with a chill or a draught. No, he couldn’t possibly stay with us. As for September, she had become impossible with her demands, Leeds said, nothing but copulation and birth, no other interests, so boring for a man who had big emergencies entrusted to him.

Sky had tried to play with his father on the beach and told him a few things about fishing, but Leeds couldn’t concentrate, the smell of fish turned his stomach, and not once did he use Sky’s name.

‘Not a very bright boy, I must confess,’ Leeds said to me.

‘Are you going to lodge a complaint with September or with me!’ I teased him when he had grumbled himself into silence.

‘Oh, Dover, my good man, you wouldn’t understand.’

I left him reclined on the ground outside the cedar’s shade and the next time I saw him he was on all fours, fiddling with a washed-out piece of wood. Then he took out a short black tube, placed it under his eyebrow, and after a while inky lettering appeared on the board. It said:
No exit. Closed until further notice.

‘What’s that!’

Leeds looked up startled, and said:

‘One of the emergency regulations, my dear chap.’

I didn’t wish to assert my authority. Even less did I want to quarrel. Besides, a real splashing rain would soon obliterate the sign. Those clever inscriptions weren’t indelible, we had learnt recently. Let him enjoy his illusions; I was, in fact, the man who supervised the new Safety Zone. Neither my first nor my second wife bothered to read Leeds’s fixture. They ignored old warning signs and remnants of boxes, and anything else that belonged to the artificial, dome-protected existence. Things growing, things smelling of the sea and rain water, things flapping in the trees—these absorbed their curiosity.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The trees kept me awake. A few hours later, the cat of heaven, as Leeds called him, started miaowing. I went to search for him. I found Leeds pulling the cat by its tail. A transparent wall seemed to be resting on his turret of a neck, and behind him on the other side of the wall, Sky struggled with a sack or a net. A strange bubbly light like a foam both illuminated the boy from below and seemed to suck him into itself. A large metal disc lay near by. Leeds was forcing Sky to go underground.

Too late, I thought, I couldn’t get through to rescue him. But the cat bit Leeds and managed to free himself. Leeds howled as the cat of heaven burrowed the earth to escape under the closing wall. Now I knew why the wall came that far down. It was, in fact, a dome of such enormous dimensions that it could seal off the middle of the island, and keep the multiplying trees, plants, mushrooms and us, of course, outside in the open. No exits for those under the cupola. Closed until further notice. That’s what Leeds meant by his emergency. But he had sinews of steel in that neck of his to support the wall before it finally touched the ground.