Inner Circle (2 page)

Eventually, you are flung out like a pebble, the communal stomach coughs you up, but there is always another haven of a box, a depository.

Rain and September had already forgotten Leeds. Rain said a while ago:

‘There will be much water from the sky, today or tomorrow, and I shall grow leaves.’ She was still looking at September. I wish September could sometimes be against her. I tried so hard from the start to make them see that they were different and that being different didn’t mean for them an ugly face, a lying voice, or a barren womb. But September echoed herself.

‘I dropped my child into the earth. The rain will wash it out—Dover.’ Each time she called me by my name, it sounded as if she had thought it up that very second. She believed she had given birth to a boy in the box. Maybe she did, it wasn’t impossible.

Why a boy, I once asked, you didn’t see him at all, you said. He dropped down heavily, he must have been a boy, she replied, and then1 said my soothing ‘Remember, remember, your month is September.’

‘Real rain goes deep, and . . .’ now she didn’t finish because my brothers Joker and Sailor were waking up. I felt their double pull at my hooks, then their right feet jerked forward, kicked the gravel and began to rummage in the clotted sand. Soon they uncovered two metal discs, lifted them together with the tubes that were buried in the earth, adjusted them for length and inserted their organs. No effort to speak of, no discomfort. Whatever we excreted was sucked into the subterranean channels, you could sense a pressure throbbing in the tubes when you held them, but that seemed to be the only evidence of the mechanism at work. And you never worried whether you would find a disc within the range of your moving feet: the whole island was studded with them, they made you trust the surface you trod on; the surface had been well prepared for the future which we now inherited from our ancestral expectations.

Click, click, and the tubes slipped in, swallowed by the pressure. The metal muted the sound, and the feet, out of habit, kicked some sand over them. Now my coincidental brothers were ready to relieve themselves of whatever their drowsy heads had accumulated by night: being the last to surface, they hadn’t as yet shed the dregs of an earlier memory which attracted this and that from the mental traffic that passed over us like the shadows on the other side of the domes. Had I not called them brothers, they would still be roaming aimlessly at the edge of crowds. Sailing from bottom to bottom, as Sailor put it for Joker’s appreciation. Sailor was fond of asking me:

‘How do you know we are your brothers!’ This was an intelligent question.

‘Because to me you are two.’ This they accepted, it made sense to them and also stood for a sign which I wanted to see in them. They already thought of themselves as two. So did my wives, though being female they couldn’t separate the trees they each desired to be and the babies they each bore and lost or imagined they had borne and lost.

To impose family ties and to reinforce them was my purpose. I invented and repeated their names, I listened to their talk and gibberish, I gave them the security of a circular motion and the freedom of the patch they could watch and lie in, one at a time, wriggling in remembered pain, resting or just gaping at the shadows of the skymen’s traffic.

I created the circle and the circle was beginning to create relationships. Leeds could have disrupted my work, I knew the migrants of chaos, I had seen panic and stampede more than once. But Leeds was gone and receding, adrift on his own sea of troubles. And the island had safety zones along the shores, against which no tempest was tall and strong enough to raise its foaming fists.

Joker had a story to tell. I was glad for Rain’s sake that a cat came into it, or rather couldn’t come out of it, as soon became obvious.

‘Once upon the other side of time,’ Joker began, ‘there was a real cat sitting in a blue plastic saucer, and the saucer was floating in a pond, and the pond was filled with milk to the brim. Now the cat couldn’t swim and he couldn’t get at the milk because each time he bent his big head the saucer tilted and the cat was afraid of falling into all that white milk. So he sat and sat in his blue saucer, and licked those few little drops of milk which he had caught on to his whiskers while bending. And then his wet whiskers dried in the sun and became so stiff, long and straight that the cat couldn’t pass through the reeds near the edge of the pond.’

‘How do you know that he had whiskers!’ said Sailor.

‘Because we both know it from that picture.’ This satisfied Sailor. They must have seen something like this on a micro-screen in the box.

Rain looked now at Joker now at me with glittering blue smiles in her enormous eyes. She didn’t, of course, understand what the pond, milk or the reeds meant, she had only a hazy idea about swimming and drowning, but the cat sounded familiar and warm which she liked as much as my constant repetition of her name. Blue, too, was the colour which belonged to her. She didn’t care what happened to Joker’s cat in the end. The word cat was all she wanted to hear, and each repetition titillated her smiles. But I was curious to catch the end of the story by its whiskers.

‘How did the cat manage to get out, Joked’

‘Out of what!’ said Sailor and tugged at my belt.

‘Out of the milk pond.’ He was satisfied.

‘The cat churned and churned his blue saucer,’ said Joker beaming all over his moon face, ‘until he made a pondful of butter. Then he walked out, leaving a trail of paw-marks on the butter, so we caught him not far from those reeds.’

‘Who caught him, Joked?’ Sailor looked worried and Rain’s blue eyes switched off the last smile. September sighed.

‘You and me, Sailor, us both.’

‘That’s good,’ said Sailor, ‘there is no more cat.’ And he set the circle in slow motion on his own initiative which astonished me.

‘We have a big saucer in the middle,’ Joker pointed at our free space, enclosed by our trotting feet. This was his first attempt at discovery and he looked puzzled and much amused.

‘This is called saucer. Saucer.’ Repeating the word, September grasped the analogy.

‘But it isn’t blue,’ said Rain. I marvelled at her display of intelligence, even though it was achieved at the expense of the cat whom I knew she had suddenly forgotten. My coincidental family was making progress. It seemed to matter less that we were only a minute inner circle surrounded by loops, zigzagging streaks and millions of dithering dots.

Stationary for a while, with my back to the crowds, I felt a new commotion like the first murmur of a tide. Then followed a splash, voices breaking against a loud voice, riding high against a communal sound barrier.

‘Can you see anything, Sailor’ He was the tallest in the circle but he had neither Leeds’s neck nor its agility. With his right hand above his eyes he was endangering the continuity of the circle, then he made a funny face to please Joker, dropped his hand and muttered in his usual drowsy way:

‘It’s not this box and it’s not the other. Can’t look over too many heads, it sends my eyes to sleep.’

‘Look again, Sailor.’ But this time I could hear the voice, each word magnified by the air. It seemed to resound against the domes and come down through their purple and golden haloes.

‘Listen—listen to the good tidings! A tree—a true tree—was born in the West under the open sky—and it is alive. It will bear fruit-and the fruit will multiply. And believe me—no storm from inside the sea—no fire from beyond the sky roof will prevail-against the tree!’

I strained my neck and my eyes, and saw head after head turn towards the voice.

The third box, Rain cried, the third from us; she couldn’t possibly have seen it, she was shorter than September, but I believed her and stood on tiptoes. Yes, there was a man on the top of a box, the third in the distance after the one to which Leeds had clung for weeks. The man seemed much older than any of us, he was in fact a strange exception to the age rule which bound us here to a communal identity, similar habits and health.

‘Why has he forgotten to die?’ September said. Like Rain, she saw the man without using her eyes.

I noticed that we had stopped circling. There was a hush over us and over those unaccountable people facing the box from which the man had spoken.

‘We hear thunder.’ Joker was nudging Sailor, who couldn’t hear a thing because he had fallen asleep. ‘They’re coming!’ a woman shrieked behind the box nearest to us.

Metal discs started popping up everywhere, tubes gushed out from the earth and swayed like snakes before collapsing into the loosened clods. There was suddenly dust at the level of our ankles, thickening as it rose.

Before the panic seized the people by their knees and necks and threw them down in heaps, I saw the old man on the box stagger and disappear through the roof as if it had a trap panel. And immediately another female cry reached me from the whirlpool of dust.

‘They’re crushing everything! They are here!’

My circle was broken. Joker and Sailor had jumped into the nearest box and slammed the door behind them. I grabbed my wives and somehow managed to push their small hands through the hooks on my belt, then I fell to the ground, pulling them down.

My arms were trying to embrace the corner of the box. The stampede was already upon us. I received a knock on my head and back, I felt a stinging pain all down my right leg.

Oh, we were too healthy on this island to cheat pain by losing consciousness. Thunder after thunder convulsed the surface.

Then I felt a soothing coldness on my neck. It spread and was followed by a different hush than that before the stampede.

‘It’s rain,’ said my first wife.

‘It’s the greatest rain I ever thought of,’ said my second wife. And the rain was rinsing our hair, sparking off pebbles from the ground, whizzing over the grit in the hollows.

‘They’ve sent it down to stop the panic.’ I meant the skymen.

‘Nice to see you again, Dover,’ I heard a voice bending over me. ‘I couldn’t think of any faster means of transport to reach you at this very same spot. Get up, Dover, you’re quite all right. My stampede was not as bad as it sounded.’

I looked up and saw his condescending neck.

‘You need another pair of hands in your circle, Dover. The five of you couldn’t hold out.’ Leeds lifted me up and clasped my hand. ‘Where are those brothers of yours?’

And then we witnessed a sight in the half-opened skies. A rainbow hung there, reflecting a small tree. Raindrops shimmered all over the reflection, as if the tree wore a robe for this annunciation.

3

‘Shut the door,’ said Joker, ‘we can’t hear a thing.’ I squeezed myself in and smelt the familiar odour of disinfectants, then perfume, both quickening the desire to touch, watch and recollect. ‘That’s where we come from, I think.’ Sailor was pointing at the underground map of Britain, flashing section after section against a net of squares, which seemed to be suspended beyond the wall of the box. This was how images appeared, extending the tangible area. Sailor knocked his fingers badly, when he tried again to show a line on the map.

‘We could hear a train before you came in. You know there are trains running under England, from Dover to Leeds, from London to Durham, places like that, and that’s where we come from.’

‘From down there,’ Joker said.

‘Oh, yes—I would like now to be on the small Inner Circle and on the big one which doesn’t stop at many places. You see names flicker by and then it’s York, you don’t get off, because you want to go round a full circle, London to London, all the time under the coast, with waves splashing three thousand feet over your head. It’s fun, and that’s where we came from, Joker and me.’

‘And you, too, I think,’ Joker said. He tried to embrace me but there wasn’t enough room for that. Then the box started exhaling whiffs of petrol and fried fish, a saucer rolled by, milk oozed from one of the squares and a puzzled cat walked right across the map and vanished, it seemed, into Joker’s hair.

‘That’s him,’ said Sailor, ‘the pond will come next.’

But it didn’t. Instead, for a well-focused moment we saw a boy munching a sandwich on an Underground platform. A poster behind him said
Top People Wear Hats.

‘He looks like you, Dover.’ I felt Sailor’s finger on my nose. ‘Though he could be me,’ he added. Then his voice thickened. ‘It’s time I had a wife or two, you know.’

As he was saying this, the screens around the wall merged into one another, the net remained behind them but now it looked more like grating with several paler bars reinforcing a further background. Animals emerged, big, small and partly visible, they paced along the net, yawning and sneezing, then the smaller of them began to leap through the squares, somehow missing us by an inch or less, then they reappeared, one by one, on the screen opposite.

‘I should have a couple of wives, you know,’ Sailor whispered into my ear and his hot fingers fondled my elbow for a while.

‘That bitchdog stinks,’ Joker made a spitting noise. ‘She’s on heat. Keep away from her, Sailor.’ He tried his best, now leaning against me, now against his brother.

Across the full length of the screen an elongated spaniel was mounting the bitch, regardless of the bars and squares, his enthusiastic tail whipping his own behind as his head moved back and forward. After the dogs, pigeons and hens flapped their wings. The cackling was hysterical, and feathers flew about for the arrival of the cock, who made a jumping entry into the turmoil, copulated briskly from hen to hen, glancing at us sideways with a beady, cynical eye. Now, gentlemen, I’m not boasting, it’s just a job and it’s already done.

Animals were our educators: we hardly ever viewed human performances.

Sometimes by mistake a scene from the surface registered itself on the screens as it was taking place outside: a standing couple, a standing copulation. Or the memory would I throw up a picture on to a confusion of hind legs, tails, tongues and beaks. Now it came. I remembered and simultaneously saw, and they saw with me. Rain, bending forward, September supporting Rain’s head with her legs; my belly flattened against Rain’s buttocks, trying to raise them. She bent farther down, sweat from her spine now trickling towards the neck, and the whole balance of Rain’s body seemed to flow into the knees and the hands below them.