Inner Circle (3 page)

‘Rain, I have your eyes now’—and the feathery, cackling noise fell upon September’s words.

‘And were we then your brothers?’ Sailor asked me when the picture vanished.

‘I don’t remember. Let’s get out of here.’ Joker helped me to find the lock on the door.

In the pale blue of late afternoon Leeds had prepared an acrobatic surprise for me.

With every muscle proclaiming his sturdy masculinity, he displayed Rain and September swinging from his arms. Very slowly he turned round, his arms locked in a clasp behind that turret of a neck.

‘I’ll give you three guesses, Dover.’

I stood in silence, nudged and jostled by the passers-by. Feeding-time was near.

‘We are a tree,’ Rain explained. She couldn’t possibly wait through my hesitation.

‘A trunk and two branches. I am drooping with rain.’

‘We are also the scales of September in the sign of Libra,’ my second wife said.

Remember, remember. I couldn’t remember whether I had even made love to her.

Perhaps she only held the other’s head and balanced the act like that scale in the Zodiac sign.

‘And I am a water-carrier,’ said Leeds, ‘with two pails swaying under my arms. I have to walk and walk. Which reminds me, Dover. The girls, your wives I mean, are keen on a long walk. As far as the tree.’

‘The tree?’ A stay in the box, however brief, had its side effect: I felt dense and dopey. A headache was throbbing in my temples.

‘The girls say they actually saw it in the sky. The tree apparent, you might call it that. Anyway, Dover, we’re going to have a sort of pilgrimage as in the days of yore.’

‘Once upon the other side of time there was a solitary tree—’ Joker began and stopped, giving his brother a wink. ‘You go on, Sailor, it’s your story.’

‘It’s nobody’s story,’ Sailor said, stretching his hand out. ‘Besides, how can you tell anything without having a circle ?’

‘I am coming!’ Rain jumped off Leeds’s arm as though it were a real branch, hugged me with a strange, wistful softness in her finger tips, but September didn’t follow her: she was still swinging, Leeds straining his neck to keep the balance. Finally he put her down.

‘A water-carrier must have two pails,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that right, Dover?’

‘We’re weak without a circle.’ And I took September’s hand.

‘You are my first husband, Dover,’ she announced this like a discovery. ‘And I am his first wife. It’s nice to have two scales in September.’ She beckoned to Leeds to join our family. He tried to do it gracefully, with a deep bowing gesture, but in the middle of the bow a puffed-up man dumped his wobbly belly on his behind and seemed glad to meet such a convenient obstacle. I laughed, then laughed again, bursting my first bubble of jealousy at this ridiculous sight. But it also brought back the memory of the erotic scene, and brief anger replaced jealousy.

Willy-nilly, I found in Leeds a co-maker of relationships. The circle was in full swing.

And our journey to the West began. We were making for the coast, so Leeds assured us, but nothing in the air or in the colours ahead indicated a change of scenery.

Only the distances between the boxes seemed a little shorter, though this could have been an illusion of movement. We certainly moved faster, edging groups of people, bypassing altogether those corridors of traffic which went parallel to a double row of boxes. Leeds was tireless in giving advice and trying to impress us. His neck acted as a permanent guide, his elbows as ploughshares through a thick crowd. He also invented a revolving pulley which did pull and did go round, but in fact consisted of his two hands on our joined arms, giving a push here, a push there, with Leeds remaining on the outside like our satellite. Someone called him that, probably Sailor, who knew a bit of astronomy from the screens, and Leeds must have been pleased because he pushed even harder at our turning hoop. From time to time he let us hear his statistical figures which he had been working out in his head.

‘It’s one man per one square yard on the average. Which should be ample. But you have to take away twenty-five square yards or so out of every fifteen hundred for the area occupied by the boxes. That’s why the congestion differential is not easy to apply.

With two people swinging on your arms, however, you could improve the ratio, but that, of course, would require quite a few mobile squads of athletes.’

We never talked about the purpose of our pilgrimage, the tree. Now and again Rain would be on the point of mentioning it, but somehow a gesture imitating a branch or a static pose satisfied her. On the day we reached the Safety Zone my brothers became restless, they muttered to themselves, dozed off for several minutes at a time, then couldn’t get rid of their dreams. When the first warning notice came up through the hazy, oppressive air, Sailor at last found the words to express his anxiety:

‘A tree is for hanging, I am telling you, and it’s usually a sailor who dangles from the rope.’ Joker nodded in approval, his moon face reflecting a remote once-upon-a-time mood.

‘And when the sailor had a brother they used to hang them both for good company. It’s no joke being a brother,’ Joker said in my direction.

I felt the sand loosening under my steps. Rain didn’t like the sensation and dragged her feet. Leeds, being heavier, seemed to he walking with a limp. The landscape became crooked and we came up to a box which had no door and was sagging from the slope of a dune together with a wide yellow board. A warning in black letters jumped at us from the yellow:

You are entering the Safety Zone. You will Bet no food, no air heating, no
protection. Domes end 100 yards after this point.

We all turned our faces upwards. September let my hand go and I heard her trembling voice.

‘I can see the colours—four of them—falling into a pit.’

In fact she saw the beginning of grey clouds evenly spread over the coast. I didn’t mind that the circle was breaking up, each clasp released from the pressure of fingers.

Only a hundred yards: how many steps were required to test this distance? The distance was echoing the invisible sea, like a shell.

‘It’s old rain from the open sky lying on the ground,’ Rain said to September, not knowing how to describe the noise of the sea; and arm-in-arm they walked ahead, like sisters rather than wives. But not for long. Their arms dropped and Rain staggered. Then September fell into the sand. She picked herself up and stumbled again.

‘What’s wrong?’ Leeds asked, but didn’t move forward.

‘Can’t you see they are unable to walk? Let’s go and help them.’

Leeds hesitated. He looked back at the warning sign and then his neck became all veins and bulging red blobs. His head seemed to be screwed into fear.

‘You go, Dover. I’ll follow you presently.’ And to my great surprise he followed me, stooping and testing the sand with each step. I shouldn’t have turned to watch him.

My eyes blinked and were suddenly filled with salty air which ached. The salty moisture settled on my lips, and before I could wipe it off each feature on my face felt numb.

I reached the women on all fours, leaving Leeds a couple of yards behind me.

‘I am sick,’ September was retching into the wet sand but nothing came out of her mouth. Her wriggling fit had just left her, she managed to raise herself on her knees. So did Rain and Leeds behind us. We were all crouching, incapable of standing up or frightened to do so. That crouching position, the strain in the knees, the sweat down the spine; so much like our sexual act, now disarmed of passion, feeble, self-mocking, having its nose rubbed in the sand.

‘The space . . .’ September whispered into my hot face, ‘it’s terrible, so terrible without people.’ ‘We’ve grown accustomed to moving in crowds and circles,’ I said.

‘We’re bound to lose balance without a human prop.’

‘But I thought I was born in the sign of balance.’

‘I know, September, I know. Remember, remember. . . .’

She interrupted my memory verse:

‘Leeds showed me the scales on his arms. Where is Leeds?’

‘There,’ I said, and an ugly tone of satisfaction prompted my next words: ‘He’s on all fours, as well as you and me.’

When finally Leeds crawled up to us, he made a fool of himself by trying to amend his previous statistical revelation:

‘One man per one square yard is a reasonable average in our spacial circumstances, but sometimes you have to allow for factors like primitive sand and a surface vacuum which wasn’t caused by a stampede. This proves, of course, that we are being well looked after.’

‘My feet,’ I heard Rain’s cry. This time I succeeded in getting up, but had to walk carefully with my legs wide apart. ‘I’m growing into the earth. It’s very painful, Dover, to feel the roots. . . .’

Without thinking I pulled her legs out of the sand and recognized blood above and below her ankles.

‘The roots, what have you done to my new-born limbs? Like myself she had never seen blood, but unlike myself she possessed no knowledge of it.

‘We’ll take you back,’ I said.

And we struggled through the empty zone, carrying her body which became our link, a safe and tangible weight to be shared and absorbed into our own strength. Joker and Sailor stood waiting by the broken-down box, their two silhouettes more comforting than the light and the music of the domes. Back on the communal side of the surface, we ate the food from the sky, slept standing in the circle and dreamt of one another. Rain’s feet were cured by the morning.

But once we had tasted the danger and the challenge, we could not stay away from the Safety Zone. We walked once again beyond the warning sign, this time keeping our heads down, with arms almost touching the sand. Joker and Sailor wanted to be with us, and for their sake the tree remained an unspoken word.

Sailor was the first to spot the tree. It stood on a rock, he told us, not far from the shore, very small and quiet. His gestures were confused and at first we couldn’t follow them. Rain buried her feet into the sand and tightened her whole body, staring and waiting.

Before we finally saw the tree, we were made to witness a gruesome sight. The surface of the sea between the shore and the rock seemed to be paved with thousands of heads.

‘They came before us,’ said Leeds.

‘They’re drowning,’ said Sailor.

‘We’re not allowed to see death,’ I said and covered my eyes.

Underground

1

‘I have two mothers,’ then people laughed which Patrick liked very much. It made him happy to be laughed at. ‘My first mother is away singing, and my second mother is very kind, and she takes me for walks in Kensington Gardens.’ And people laughed less, and didn’t ask him about his father. Which was a pity. Because Patrick could have told them what a good sleeper his father was, by day and by night, and on the Underground too.

Patrick’s second mother lived alone in a dolled-up house glued with pink-and-blue edging and some ivy to another and much bigger house, from which a poodle kept yelping at unusual hours. The Fulham Road corner of the street smelt of fresh paint and the other corner seemed for ever buried in garbage stink, which fascinated Patrick on their walks to the bus.

After four or five visits to Dolly-mum at her ivy doll house, Patrick couldn’t any longer delay that surprise call on his father, who disliked being woken up before half past one in the afternoon. But Dolly said again and again that boys should be chummy with their dads, who had chums everywhere, and that to knock on a bedroom door at lunch-time was quite all right if you happened to be a little chum yourself. She took him as far as number five, just behind a pub in the backwaters of Chelsea at World’s End, and sometimes when she looked tired or worried Dolly-mum would add her maternal advice:

‘Patrick, listen to me, you must keep reminding him you are his son. Men are forgetful, stupid and stingy with money, they never try to save on drink, oh no, but they save on presents. I know men, they’re all misers. So you ask him what you want, Patrick, don’t be shy.’

‘I don’t want anything, Dolly-mum. I have you and my other mummy, and father always says do-you-need-a-quid? and I say no, dad. What is a quid?’

‘A pound, Patrick. Next time he asks you, you just take that quid of his, and buy yourself a plastic wallet at Woolworth’s to have it ready for more money. Now you run along, knock hard on his door and kiss him good morning on the ear. That will wake up your dad. And don’t tell me his ear has whiskers like a cat. I know it has.’

Patrick was a slow but obedient
boy,
and he did what Dolly-mum told him. That kiss on the ear made a loud smacking noise, and his father jumped up, hit the flowery headboard where the biggest stain was, and grabbed a packet of cigarettes from the table, which somehow restored his sense of balance.

Coach!’ he said. ‘Who is it, who is it? My head! And now what? Where are those damned matches? Ah, thank you.’ He looked at the clock on a marble stand, then at Patrick, lit a Cigarette, coughed volubly and inhaled again.

‘It’s only a quarter past one. Find me the telephone book, there’s a good girl.’

Patrick transported the volumes one by one, drew the curtains, but not far enough, because he couldn’t give them a sharp pull. His father said from semi-darkness:

‘Oh, it’s you, Patrick. That beastly telephone rang straight into my ear.’ He showed which one, and screwed his little finger into it. ‘Still ringing. Horrible.’ Patrick couldn’t see any whiskers at all. ‘Had early lunch at school, my boy?’

‘I am not at school, father. They chucked me out because of those small cherry-trees, don’t you remember, dad?’

‘Ah, yes, we must find a school for you. It’s bad at your age to be missing school lunches, you know. What did you do to those trees, Patrick?’

‘I pulled them all out, eight in one row and seven in another. They had no sun where they were.’ ‘Well-they must have been badly planted. Not deep enough.

You’re strong though for a boy of nine. Wait like a good . . . child while 1 give my chums a couple of tinkles. Take something to read from the floor.’

‘I can’t read, father,’ said Patrick. He could, however, count to ten, some days to eleven, so he watched the dial and the cigarettes. His father made nine telephone calls and smoked four cigarettes. The ninth call was to a lady chum who must have invited him to afternoon tea or maybe to a walk, because he looked pleased, beckoned to Patrick to sit on the bed and gave him one solid pat on the head.