Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) (16 page)

Reports of accidents came flying in as the Emergency Meeting continued. Besides the escalator catastrophe, there were two incidents in which runaway wheelchairs rolled down the slope in front of a hospital and were hit by moving cars on the road outside, and nine incidents in which people collided with each other after slipping and falling from stairs, resulting in contusions, fractures, badly bitten tongues, and other injuries. Some were drowned and others went missing when six anglers, including children and seniors, slid into the sea from a seafront angling arena. And so on, and so on, and so on.

The meeting continued until late afternoon. At one point, Fedora Last – at the stern insistence of Rory O’Storm – reluctantly issued an order prohibiting the use of escalators. However, she forcibly deferred measures designed to prevent other kinds of accidents, saying it was “too early to tell”. The meeting ended with the following resolutions.

1. All residents of Marine City will sooner or later come to know of the City’s tilt. As such, no special steps shall be taken to report it.

2. As for accidents caused by the tilt, measures shall only be taken in serious cases. The others shall be ignored as they are too insignificant.

3. Until the damage at the bottom of Marine City is repaired, City employees shall not officially admit to the existence of the tilt in word or deed.

4. Marine City employees shall not be permitted to move home or evacuate outside the City.

5. City employee Caprice Le Mesurier, currently under police investigation on suspicion of corruption, is to be released immediately, since her services are needed in responding to this emergency.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Rory O’Storm – the only man to attend it – was utterly enraged and announced his resignation.

On the same day, Rod Le Mesurier toured stationery shops and builders’ merchants in the City to accept their many orders for spirit levels, protractors, set squares, T-squares, and other sundry instruments, then returned to his office to order them from the company warehouse. One week later, the warehouse had no stock left at all. By the time the City’s residents knew of the tilt and were falling over themselves to buy these items because they needed to stop their furniture moving – as a result of which the products were soon sold out – the tilt had already become so severe that such measuring instruments were utterly useless. Even without earthquakes or tidal waves, the weight of the pachinko balls leaning to the southwest was enough to set off a chain reaction of breaches in the bulkhead walls. It was far too dangerous to even attempt repair work. With no contractors willing to accept the work, the progressive destruction of the ballast tanks was allowed to continue. The angle of inclination increased to eleven degrees. There was a series of accidents involving overturned vehicles, and the number of cars crossing from the metropolis decreased. But Mayor Fedora Last took no measures to cope with these accidents. Her reasoning was that it was perfectly normal to have sloping roads.

It was the punctilious Miss Loyalty who was most annoyed by the tilt in her home, which put her in a state of nervous exhaustion. Though not actually an employee of the City, she was a member of the women’s group, and had pledged allegiance to Fedora Last as an external member of the Mayor’s Brain Trust. As such, she wouldn’t even dream of leaving Marine City. She fastened down all her furniture like a woman possessed, adjusted her picture frames, and fixed them at an angle to match the overall tilt of her apartment. Then she started walking with her body inclined at an angle of precisely eleven degrees to the southwest, or, to be more exact, to the south-southwest-by-west, ensuring that she remained perpendicular to the ground. The same was true when she stood still. In this way, Miss Loyalty could demonstrate that Marine City was not tilting, as she was still standing perpendicular to the ground, enabling her also to confirm her loyalty to Fedora Last. What’s more, she maintained this eleven-degree inclination when she commuted into the metropolis to work every day. Thus she was able to assert that it was not Marine City that was tilting, but the rest of the world.

Soon, others who worked in the metropolis started to copy Miss Loyalty, and tried to find spiritual balance by tilting their bodies. As a result, many people could now be seen in the metropolis walking with their bodies tilted eleven degrees to the southwest. Not only did this mark them out as residents of Marine City, but the direction in which they tilted was also a useful aid to judging compass bearings.

Early on Sunday – the day the tilt increased from eleven to twelve degrees – Professor McLogick prepared to move out of the City. He didn’t keep many books at home anyway, and his furniture easily fitted into a single removal van. He’d nearly finished loading the furniture, with the help of two removal men and two of his students, when they were spotted by some local housewives who’d just got up and now came to surround them. Most of them were sympathizers of the Mayor, and had already tried various tricks to stop people escaping. This time, however, their adversary was Professor McLogick. They knew that their persuasion would be to no avail, that the tables would only be turned and he’d start
lecturing them, and that, if anything, they’d end up wishing he would just leave. So all they did, at first, was to surround the truck from a distance and loudly hurl abuse.

“So you’re running away then!”

“Coward! Call yourself a man?!”

“Frightened of a little slope, are we?”

But Professor McLogick wouldn’t be Professor McLogick if he didn’t have his say at this point. “Ladies,” he called out loudly. “You’d better leave quickly too. The buildings will start falling soon. After all, it stands to reason that they haven’t been built properly, with all this bribery and corruption.”

From among the housewives stepped one woman. She strode forwards, stopped in front of the Professor, and slapped him hard on the face.

It was Miss Loyalty. The sound of the slap rang out through the fresh morning air.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” screamed one of the students, full of youthful vigour. He ran straight up to Miss Loyalty and punched her to the ground.

All hell broke loose. The house was in the middle of an estate. One look from their upper floor balconies told the other residents what was happening right away. Housewives came swarming in like wasps from all directions.

The Professor jumped onto the loading platform at the back of the van. “Get in quick! Get in quick!” he yelled at the students, who were fighting with the women over some boxes that hadn’t been loaded yet. “I don’t need those. Get in quick. If we’re caught by the police, we’ll all be executed!”

“Jesus!”

“Move it!”

The removal men, shaken at the thought of execution, started up the van in a panic. The students managed to free themselves from the women, and jumped onto the platform in the nick of time. The housewives, being women, declined to chase the van in a bid to stop it leaving. And so, Professor McLogick made his escape from Marine City.

The following morning, the poetess Stille Hungova awoke at six o’clock, still hungover, and went to get a drink of tap water. “Urghhh!” she exclaimed as she spat it out. It was sea water.

The water pipes from the mainland had burst. They’d been designed with sufficient tolerance for movement, bearing in mind that Marine City was built on an artificial island. But now the pipes had been crushed on the seabed. The water supply to Marine City was cut. The gas supply was also turned off, in view of the obvious danger. That day, Mayor Fedora Last asked the Waterworks Bureau for a supply of water to Marine City using tank trucks. Meanwhile, shoppers fought tooth and nail over mineral water in supermarkets and propane gas in hardware stores; dozens of housewives were seriously injured.

Caprice Le Mesurier, appointed Chief of Police to succeed Rory O’Storm, suddenly started to assume a more friendly attitude towards her husband Rod. This was partly because she saw him in a different light now that he’d been promoted to Head of Sales. But it was also because she’d been compelled to vow even greater allegiance to Fedora Last, like it or not, in view of the tremendous debt she now owed her. She’d be in dire straits if Rod said he wanted to move out. On that day, as it happened, the Transport Bureau gave notice that the bus service between the metropolis and the City would terminate the following day. Now Caprice would have to buy Rod the car he’d always wanted.

Prompted by the loss of water and the termination of the bus service, more citizens now tried to escape to the mainland, resulting in scores of skirmishes with people trying to stop them. The writer Justa Plagiarist realized there was no way he could carry all his household effects off, so he simply boarded the last bus to the metropolis with nothing but the clothes on his back. Supermarket owner Kapital Interest and his young wife were about to sneak away in their car, taking only their art works and other belongings of value, when they were discovered by the neighbourhood house wives, who immediately destroyed the car and the art works in it. For good measure they also pulled the clothes off the backs of the fleeing pair, leaving them to run for their lives, half-naked, across Marine Bridge.

Children and students who attended schools and colleges in the metropolis gradually fled across the bridge to safety, some with their parents, some on their own as their parents insisted on staying, some after violent rows with their mothers. At least the housewives didn’t prevent
them
from leaving. They also turned a blind eye to parents who left with their children. This was because there’d been a series of accidents in which infants had fallen to their deaths from tilting stairs or balconies in their homes, fallen on roads and suffered serious harm, and so on. But men who tried to leave on grounds of greater convenience for commuting were stopped and forced to commute from Marine City by car. Rod Le Mesurier did so every day, taking five others with him. Often, husbands who worked in the metropolis would fail to return home in the evening, leaving their abandoned wives to be pilloried and vilified by their neighbours.

The national government issued an order for all residents of Marine City to leave the island. Furious, Fedora Last declared her intention to disobey the order. It was “tyrannical interference in the affairs of a local authority” and a “serious challenge to feminism”. “I will not obey the order.
Marine City is not tilting
.”

The tilt worsened with each passing day. On Wednesday it was eighteen degrees, on Thursday it was twenty. Soon, the power had failed and telephone links were broken. On Thursday evening, Marine Bridge collapsed into the sea with a great reverberating boom. With that, the road connection to the metropolis was lost.

Professor McLogick’s prediction that buildings would collapse was, in fact, inaccurate. The only building to fall was Marine City Hall, which was built of brick. Most steel-reinforced concrete buildings had upright metal sections welded to the steel base of the City, replacing the usual pile-driven foundations. But now those buildings were starting to become warped. Of course, lifts stopped working. Doors would not open once closed, nor close once opened. So, for fear of being trapped inside their homes, residents started to leave their doors open. Even so, the buildings somehow stayed upright. But the shift in their centre of gravity only served to accelerate the tilt in Marine City. On Friday, the angle reached twenty-three degrees. At such an acute angle, even pavements that were originally
flat could no longer be walked on. Well, “walk” was hardly the word anyway – people would be sliding and falling as they crept along the roads. They also had to be wary of objects falling from above. Children’s toys, shoes, kitchenware, and sundry household goods falling from verandas were one thing. But sometimes even dogs or people would come tumbling down, or pianos would crash through iron railings and plummet to the ground. Which was not such a laughing matter. Soon, it was normal to see housewives, who’d popped out for a spot of shopping, returning home with bloody injuries and their clothing in shreds.

Several buildings along the coast at the southwestern end of Marine City – including a children’s amusement centre, the Toximere Clinic, and a poodle parlour – were soon submerged. A nearby road that ran from north to south sloped diagonally into the sea. Sometimes cars or people would slide sideways off the camber of the road and simply disappear under the water. For this reason, the area came to be constantly patrolled by police boats. As well as saving people who came sliding down the road, they also had the admirable task of rescuing desperate Marine City residents who tried to escape the City secretly at night and ferrying them over to the mainland. Helicopters circled above the City during the day, urging residents to leave and telling them where the police boats were waiting.

“Damn. It could at least have collapsed while I was at work. Then I needn’t have come home!”

Caprice Le Mesurier dragged Rod, still grumbling thus as he gazed out through the window of their apartment – which now leant at an angle of twenty-six degrees – at the straits into which Marine Bridge had collapsed, back into bed on Saturday morning.

“What are you moaning about? Come here, I said.”

“But it’s every morning these days!”

“What about it?! You haven’t anything better to do, have you?!”

The Le Mesurier residence was on the northeastern side of the building, at the far end of an open walkway on the eleventh floor. As the couple entered the throes of ecstasy, the nails that fastened
the legs of their bed to the floor came loose, causing the bed to slide out of the bedroom with considerable force. It travelled across the living room and out through the front door (which had of course been left open) onto the walkway, where it struck a woman and hurled her high over the railings, before finally colliding with the iron railings at the southwestern end. The railings stopped the bed, but the momentum sent Rod and Caprice, still in their coital embrace, flying naked through the air.

Miss Loyalty, who could no longer get to work, was appointed Chief of Police to replace the late Caprice Le Mesurier. Nothing could have suited her better. Since the only remaining police staff were two female deskworkers, she donned the uniform herself, correctly tilted her body at an angle of twenty-six degrees to the south-southwest, and ran around Marine City investigating incidents and accidents as if considerations such as gravity were not an issue. If she spotted anyone trying to leave the City, she would take out her pistol and fire shots at them. She remained active even at night, when she would be involved in spectacular gunfights with the police boats as she tried to stop them carrying escapees to the mainland. With this, those left on the island lost their last remaining means of escape.