The Memoirs of a Survivor (12 page)

Perhaps, in describing as I have done only what went on among ourselves, in our neighhourhood, I have not been able to give a clear enough picture of how our by now very remarkable society worked … for after all, it
was
working. All this time, while ordinary life simply dissolved away, or found new shapes, the structure of government continued, though heavy and cumbersome and becoming all the time more ramified. Nearly everyone who had a job at all was in administration - yes, of course we ordinary people joked that the machinery of government was maintained so that privileged folk could have jobs and salaries. And there was some truth in it. What government really did was to adjust itself to events, while pretending, probably even to itself, that it initiated them. And the law courts worked on, plenty of them; the processes of law were infinitely tricky and prolonged, or sudden and Draconian, as if the impatience of the practitioners of law with their own processes and precedents got itself impressed by the way law could suddenly be dispensed with altogether, be overridden and rewritten -and then what had been substituted went grinding along as heavily as before. The prisons were as full as ever, though expedients were always being found to empty them: so many crimes were being committed, and there seemed to be new and unforeseen categories of crime every day. Reforms schools. Borstals, welfare homes, old-age homes -all these proliferated, and they were savage and dreadful places.

Everything worked. Worked somehow. Worked on an edge, on one side of which was what authority tolerated, on the other, what it could not: this meeting was well over the edge. And very soon the police would arrive in a fleet of cars and drag off these children and put them behind bars in a ‘home’ where they wouldn’t survive a week. Nobody, knowing their history, could feel anything but compassion for them; not one of us wished for them an end in a ‘home’ - but neither did we want, we could not tolerate, a visit of the police which would bring to official notice a hundred living arrangements that were not legal Houses being lived in by people who didn’t own them, gardens growing food for people who had no right to eat it, the ground floors of deserted houses accommodating horses and donkeys which were transport for the innumerable little businesses that illegally flourished, the little businesses themselves where all the riches of our old technology were being so ingeniously adapted and transformed, minuscule turkey farms, chicken runs, rabbit sheds - all this new life, like growth pushing up under old trees, was illegal. None of it should exist. None of it, officially, existed; and when ‘they’ were forced into seeing these things, they sent in troops or the police to sweep it all away. Such a visit would be referred to in a headline, a broadsheet, a newscast as ‘Such and such a street was cleaned out today.’ And everyone knew exactly what had happened and thanked fortune it was someone else’s street.

Such a ‘clean-out’ was what everybody feared more than anything, and yet we were tempting ‘them’ by gathering together. Gerald talked on, in an emotional, desperate way, as if the act of talking itself could produce some solution. He said at one point that the only way to cope with the ‘kids’ was to separate them and put them into households in ones and twos. I remember the jeering that went up from the children, and their white, angry faces. They stopped their pathetic war-dance and stood huddled, facing outwards, weapons at the ready.

A young man appeared over the heads of the crowd: he had his arm around the trunk of a tree and was holding himself there. ‘What are we doing this for?’ he shouted. ‘If they came now that would be the end of us, never mind about those kids. And if you want to know what I think, we should inform the police and be done with it. We can’t cope with it. Gerald has tried - haven’t you, Gerald?’

And he disappeared, sliding down the trunk.

Emily now spoke. It looked as if someone had asked her to. She stood on the pile of bricks, serious, worried, and said: “What can you expect? These kids defend themselves. That’s what they have learned. Perhaps we should persevere with them? I’ll volunteer if others will.’

‘No, no, no,’ came from everywhere in the crowd. Someone shouted out: ‘You’ve got a broken arm from them by the look of it.’

‘Rumour broke the arm, not the kids,’ said Emily smiling, and a few people laughed.

And there we stood. It is not often a crowd so large can remain silent, in indecision. To call the police would be a 
real descent away from what we could tolerate in ourselves, and we could not bring ourselves to do it.

A man shouted: ‘I’ll call the police myself, and you can have it out with me afterwards. We’ve got to do it, or the whole neighbourhood will go up in flames one of these nights.’

And now the children themselves began edging away, still in their tight little band, clutching their sticks, their stones, their catapults.

Someone shouted: They’re off.’ They were. The crowd jostled and swayed, trying to see how the children ran across the road and disappeared into the dusk.

‘Shame,’ called a woman from the crowd. “They’re scared, poor little mites.’

At that moment there was a shout: ‘The police!’ - and everyone was running. From the windows of my flat, Gerald, Emily and I and some others watched the great cars come roaring up, their lights flashing, their sirens shrieking. There was no one on the pavement. The cars drove by in a pack, around a block, and then back and around again. The shrieking, whining, clanging posse of monsters drove around and about our silent streets for half an hour or so, ‘showing their teeth’, as we said, and then they went away.

What ‘they’ could not tolerate, could not tolerate even now, was the semblance of a public meeting, which might threaten them. Extraordinary and pathetic, for the last thing that interested anyone by this time was changing the form of government: we wanted only to forget it.

When the streets were quiet, Emily and Gerald went off to the other house, to see if the children had gone back there. But they had been and gone, taking with them all their little belongings - sticks and stones and weapons, bits of roast rat, uncooked potatoes.

The two had the house to themselves. There was nothing to prevent a new community being made there. The old one might be restored? No, of course it could not: something organic, which had grown naturally, had been destroyed.

It was cold. There was very little fuel. In the long dark afternoons and evenings I sat with a single candle glimmering in my room. Or I would put it out, and let the fire light the room.

Sitting there one day, staring at the fire-nicker, I was through it and beyond - into the most incongruous scene you could imagine. How can I say’ill-rimed’of a world where time did not exist? All the same, even there, where one took what came, did not criticize the order of things, I was thinking: What a strange scene to show itself now!

I was with Hugo. Hugo was not just my accompaniment, an aide, as a dog is. He was a being, a person, in his own right, and necessary to the events I was seeing.

It was a girl’s room, a schoolgirl’s. Rather small, with conventional flowered curtains, a white spread for the bed, a desk with school books laid tidily, a school timetable pinned on a white cupboard. In the room, in front of a mirror that ordinarily was not part of the room at all (it had a little looking-glass tacked to the wall above a washbasin), a long, capacious mirror all scrolled and gilded and curlicued and fluted, the sort of mirror one associated with a film set or a smart dress shop or the theatre - in front of this mirror, here only because the atmosphere and emotional necessities of the scene needed more than the sober small square looking-glass, was a young woman. Was Emily, a girl presented or parcelled up as a young woman.

Hugo and I stood side by side, looking at her. My hand was on the beast’s neck, and I could feel the tremors of his disquiet coming up into my hand from his misgiving heart. Emily was fourteen or so, but ‘well grown’ as once they had been used to put it. She was in evening dress. The dress was scarlet. It is hard to describe what my feelings were on seeing it, seeing her. They were certainly violent. I was shocked by the dress, or rather, that such dresses had ever been tolerated, ever been worn by any woman, because of what they made of the woman. But they had been taken for granted, had been seen as just another fashion, no worse or better than any.

The dress was tight around waist and bust: the word ‘bust’ is accurate, those weren’t breasts, that breathed and lifted or drooped and could change with emotion, or the month’s changes: they made a single, inflated, bulging mound. Shoulders and back were naked. The dress was tight to the knees over hips and bottom - again the accurate word, for Emily’s buttocks were rounded out into a single protuberance. Below, it twirled and flared around her ankles. It was a dress of blatant vulgarity. It was also, in a perverted way, non-sexual, for all its advertisement of the body, and embodied the fantasies of a certain kind of man who, dressing a woman thus, made her a doll, ridiculous, both provocative and helpless; disarmed her, made her something to hate, to pity, to fear - a grotesque. In this monstrosity of a dress, which was a conventional garment worn by hundreds of thousands of women within my lifetime, coveted by women, admired by women in innumerable mirrors, used by women to clothe their masochistic fantasies - inside this scarlet horror stood Emily, turning her head this way and that before the glass. Her hair was ‘up’, leaving her nape bare. She had scarlet nails. In Emily’s lifetime the fashion had never been thus - there had been no fashion at all, at least, for ordinary people, but here she was, a few paces from us, and sensing us there, her faithful animal and her anxious guardian, she turned her head, slow, slow, and looked at us with long lowered lashes, her lips held apart for fantasy kisses. Into the room came the large, tall woman, Emily’s mother, and her appearance at once diminished Emily, made her smaller, so that she began to dwindle from the moment the mother stood there. Emily faced her and, as she shrank in size, acted out her provocative sex, writhing and letting her tongue protrude from her mouth. The mother gazed, horrified, full of dislike, while her daughter got smaller and smaller, was a tiny scarlet doll, with its pouting bosom, its bottom outlined from waist to knees. The little doll twisted and postured, and then vanished in a flash of red smoke, like a morality tale of the flesh and the devil.

Hugo moved forward into the space before the mirror and sniffed and smelled at it, and then at the floor where Emily had stood. The mother’s face was twisted with dislike, but now it was this beast that was affecting her so.
‘Go
away,’ she said, in a low, breathless voice - that voice squeezed out of us by an extremity of dislike or fear. ‘Go away, you dirty filthy animal.’ And Hugo retreated to me, we backed away together before the advancing woman who had her fist raised to hit me, hit Hugo. We backed away, fast, then faster, while the woman advanced, grew large, became enormous, absorbing into herself Emily’s girlhood room with its simpering conventionality, the incongruous mirror and - snap! - we were back in the living-room, in the dark place where the single candle bloomed in its hollow of light, where the small fire warmed a little space of air around it. I was sitting in my usual place. Hugo was upright near the wall, looking at me. We looked at each other. He was whimpering … no, the right word is crying. He was crying, in desolation, as a human does. He turned and crept away into my bedroom.

And that was the last time I saw Emily there in what I have called the ‘personal’. I mean that I did not again enter scenes that showed her development as a girl, or baby, or child. That horrible mirror-scene, with its implications of perversity, was the end. Nor, entering that other world through - and this was new, too - the flames, or the husbanded glow of the fire as I sat beside it through these long autumn nights, did I find the rooms which opened and opened out from each other: or I did not think I had. Returning from a trip into that place, I could not keep a clear memory of what I had experienced, where I had been. I would know that I
had
been there, from the emotions that sustained, or were draining, me: I had been fed there, from some capacious, murmuring source all comfort and sweetness; I had been frightened and threatened. Or perhaps in, or under, the thick light of this room seemed now to shimmer another light which came from
there
-I had brought it with me and it stayed for a while, making me long for what it represented.

And when it faded, how slow and dim and heavy was the air … Hugo had developed a dry cough and, as we sat together, he might suddenly jump up and go to the window, nosing at it, his sides labouring, and I would open it, realizing that I, too, was in a stupor from the fug and the heaviness of the room. We would stand there side by side, breathing the air that flowed in from outside, trying to flush our lungs clean with it.

After some days when I had not seen Emily at all, I went to Gerald’s house through streets which were disordered, as always, but seemed much cleaner. It was as if an excess of dirtiness and mess had erupted everywhere, but then winds, or at least movements of air, had taken some of it away. I saw no one during this walk.

I half expected to find that efforts had been made towards restoring the vegetable garden. No. It was wrecked and trampled, and some chickens were at work in it. A dog was creeping towards them under the bushes. This was so rare a sight that I had to stop and look. Not one dog, but a pack of dogs, and they were creeping on all sides towards the pecking chickens. I cannot tell you how uneasy this made me: there was something enormous waiting to burst in on me, some real movement and change in our situation: dogs! a pack of dogs, eleven or twelve of them, what could it possibly mean? And, watching them, my prickling skin and the cold sweat on my forehead told me I was afraid, and had good reason to be: the dogs could choose me instead of the chickens. I went as fast as I could inside the house. Which was clean and empty. Ascending through the house I was listening for life in the rooms off the landings -nothing. At the top of the house, a closed door. I knocked and Emily opened it a crack - saw it was me, and let me in, shutting it fast again and bolting it. She was dressed in furs, trousers of rabbit or cat, a fur jacket, a grey fur cap pulled
low over her face. She looked like a pantomime cat. But pale, and sorrowful. Where was Gerald?