The Memoirs of a Survivor (8 page)

She, thinking of time, speaking of it as a girl was once expected to while she marked the slow overtaking of the milestones one by one into womanhood and freedom, said, ‘I’m coming up to fifteen,’ because she had just passed her fourteenth birthday. She had said that only yesterday; she was capable of talking like that, even pertly and with a fling of her hair, like a ‘young girl’. Meanwhile she had just come from lovemaking, and no girl’s lovemaking at that.

All that morning I listened to the sobbing while I sat working with her. But Emily heard nothing, though I couldn’t believe it.

‘Can’t you hear someone crying?’ I asked, as casual as could be, while I was twisting and turning inwardly not to hear that miserable sound.

‘No, can you?’ And off she went to stand at the window, Hugo beside her. She was looking to see if Gerald had arrived yet. He had not. She went to bath, to dress; at the window she stood waiting - yes, he was just arriving. And now she would stand there a little longer, careful not to see him, so as to assert her independence, to emphasize this other life of hers with me. She would linger half an hour, an hour. She would even sit down again with her ugly yellow animal, fondling and teasing him. Her silence would grow tense, her stares out of the window more stylized:
Girl at Window Oblivious of her Lover
.
Then her hand on the animal’s head, stroking and patting, would forget him, would fall away. Gerald had seen her. He had noticed her 
not
noticing him. He had turned away: unlike her, he genuinely did not care very much, or rather he did care, but not at all in the same way. At any rate, now, this afternoon, June was there, and Maureen, a dozen other girls. And Emily could not bear it. She went, with a kiss for her Hugo. As for me I got the ritual: ‘I’ll just go out for a little if that is all right with you.’

And in a moment she was with them, her family, her tribe, her life. A striking-looking girl, with her dark hair flat on either side of a pale, too-earnest face, she was where Gerald was, who swaggered there with the knives in his belt, his whiskers, his strong brown arms. Good Lord, how many centuries had we overturned, how many long slow steps of man’s upclimbing did Emily undo when she crossed from my flat to the life on the pavement! And what promise, what possibilities, what experiments, what variations on the human theme had been cancelled out! Watching, I fell into despair at the precariousness of every human attempt and effort, and I left the window. It was that afternoon I tried deliberately to reach behind the wall: I stood there a long time looking and waiting. The wall did not have light lying there now, was uniform, dull, blank. I went up and pressed my palms against it, and moved my hands all over it, feeling and sensing, trying everything to make the heavy solidity of the thing go down under the pressure of my will. It was nonsense, I knew that; it was never because of my, or anybody’s, wanting when that wall went down and made a bridge or a door. But the interminable low sobbing, the miserable child, was driving me frantic, was depriving me of ordinary sense … yet by turning my head I could see her, a lusty young girl on the pavement, unsmiling perhaps, because of her innate seriousness, but very far indeed from weeping. It was the child I wanted to pick up and kiss and soothe. And the child was so close, it was a question only of finding the right place on the wall to press, as in the old stories. A particular flower in the pattern, or a point found by counting just so many inches from here to there, and then gently pushed … but, of course, I knew there could be nothing in a deliberate attempt of the will. Yet I stood there all afternoon, and into the evening, as it darkened outside and the flares were lit on the pavement, showing the crowding masses eating, drinking, milling about in their clans and alliances. I let my palms move over the wall, slowly, inch by inch, but I did not find a way in that day, nor the next, I never did find that weeping child who remained there, sobbing hopelessly alone and disowned, and with long years in front of her to live through before time could put strength into her and set her free.

I never found Emily. But I did find … the thing is, what I did find was inevitable. I could have foreseen it. The finding had about it, had in it as its quintessence, the banality, the tedium, the smallness, the restriction, of that ‘personal’ dimension. What else could I find - unexpectedly, it goes without saying - when behind that wall I ran and ran along passages, along corridors, into rooms where I
knew
she must be but where she was not, until at last I found her: a blonde, blue-eyed child, but the blue eyes were reddened and sullen with weeping. Who else could it possibly be but Emily’s mother, the large cart-horse woman, her tormentor, the world’s image? It was not Emily I took up in my arms, and whose weeping I tried to shush. Up went the little arms, desperate for comfort, but they would be one day those great arms that had never been taught tenderness; the face, scarlet with need, was solaced at last into a pain-drained exhaustion as the fair little child collapsed, head on my shoulder, and the soft wisps of gold baby-hair came up dry and pretty as I rubbed the dank strands gently through my fingers, to absorb the sweat. A pretty, fair little girl, at last finding comfort in my arms … and who was it I saw at an earlier stage than the scene where a little girl joyously smeared the chocolate-brown faeces into her hair, her face, her bedding? For once, following a low sobbing, I walked into a room that was all white and clean and sterile, the nightmare colour of Emily’s deprivation. A nursery. Whose? This was before a brother or sister had been born, for she was tiny, a baby, and alone. The mother was else
where, it was not time to feed. The baby was desperate with hunger. Need clawed in her belly, she was being eaten alive by the need for food. She yelled inside the thick smothering warmth; sweat scattered off her scarlet little face; she twisted her head to find a breast, a bottle, anything: she wanted liquid, warmth, food, comfort. She twisted and fought and screamed. And screamed - for time must pass before she was fed, the strict order of the regime said it must be so: nothing could move that obdurate woman there, who had set her own needs and her relation with her baby according to some timetable alien to them both, and who would obey it to the end. I knew I was seeing an incident that was repeated again and again in Emily’s? her mother’s? early life. It was a continuing thing; had gone on, day after day, month after month. There had been a screaming and hungry, then a whimpering and sullen, baby, wanting the next meal which did not come, or if it did come, was not enough. There was. something in that strong impervious woman which made this so, dictated it. Necessity. The strict laws of this small personal world. Heat. Hunger. A fighting of emotion. The hot red running of flames from a barred fireplace on white walls, white wool, white wood, white, white. The smell of sick rising from the wet that grated under the chin, the smell of wet heavy wool. And smallness, extreme smallness, weakness, a helplessness reaching out and crying for the little crumbs of food, freedom, variation of choice which were all that could reach this little hot place where the puppets jerk to their invisible strings.

I think this is the right place to say something more about ‘it’. Though of course there is no ‘right’ place or time, since there was no particular moment marking - then or now -‘its’ beginning. And yet there did come a period when everyone was talking about ‘it’; and we knew we had not been doing this until recently: there was a different ingredient in our lives. Perhaps I would have done better to have begun this 
chronicle with an attempt at a full description of ‘it’. But is it possible to write an account of anything at all without ‘it’ - in some shape or another - being the main theme? Perhaps, indeed, ‘it’ is the secret theme of all literature and history, like writing in invisible ink between the lines, which springs up, sharply black, dimming the old print we knew so well, as life, personal or public, unfolds unexpectedly and we see something where we never thought we could - we see ‘it’ as the ground-swell of events, experience … Very well then, but what
was
‘it’? … I am sure that ever since there were men on earth ‘it’ has been talked of precisely in this way in times of crisis, since it is in crisis ‘it’ becomes visible, and our conceit sinks before its force. For ‘it’ is a force, a power, taking the form of earthquake, a visiting comet whose balefulness hangs closer night by night distorting all thought by fear - ‘it’ can be, has been, pestilence, a war, the alteration of climate, a tyranny that twists men’s minds, the savagery of a religion.

‘It’, in short, is the word for helpless ignorance, or of helpless awareness. It is a word for man’s inadequacy?

‘
Have you heard anything new about it
?’

‘
So and so said last night that it
…’

Worse still when the stage is reached of “Have you heard anything new’, when ‘it’ has absorbed everything into itself, and nothing else can be meant when people ask what is moving in our world, what moves our world. It. Only it, a much worse word than ‘they’; for ‘they’ at least are humanity too, can be moved, are helpless, like ourselves.

‘It’, perhaps - on this occasion in history - was above all a consciousness of something ending.

How would Emily put what she felt into words? She would describe this, perhaps, in terms of that image of her sweeping, sweeping, the sorcerer’s apprentice put to work in a spiteful garden against floods of dying leaves that she could never clean away no matter how hard she tried. Her sense of duty but expressed in images - she could not say of herself that yes, she was a good little girl and not a bad dirty little girl; a good little girl who must love cherish and pro
tect her brother, her baby, the defenceless, the powerless, the amiably, indifferently smiling, who sat there all loose and slack in their damp, strong-smelling white wool. ‘It was so hard,’ she might say. ‘Everything was so difficult, such an effort, such a burden, all those children in the house, not one of them would do a thing to help unless I got at them all the time, they turned me into a tyrant and laughed at me, but there was no need for that, they could have had something equal and easy if they had done their parts but, no, I always had to overlook everything, comb their dirty hair and see if they had washed and then all those sores that they got when they wouldn’t eat sensibly, and the horrible smell of disinfectants all the time that the government supplied and the way June got sick, it drove me crazy with worry, she kept getting ill for no particular reason - that was it, there was never any good reason for things, and I worked and I worked and it was always the same, something happened and then it all came to nothing.’

Yes, that is probably how Emily’s version of that time would sound.

June, returning with Emily to my flat one day, about a fortnight after her induction into womanhood -I put it like that because this was how she obviously felt it - had changed physically, and in every way. Her experience had marked her face, which was even more defenceless, in her sad-waif style, than before. And she was looking older than Emily. Her body still had the flat thickness through the waist of a child, and her breasts had fattened without shaping. Anxiety, or love, had made her eat enough to put on weight. We saw her, that eleven-year-old, as she would look as a middle-aged woman: the thick working body, the face that accommodated, that always seemed able to accommodate, two opposing qualities: the victim’s patient helplessness, the sharp inquisitiveness of the user.

June was not well. Our questions brought out of her that this was nothing new, she hadn’t been too good ‘for quite a time’. Symptoms? ‘I dunno, jst feel bad, you know what I mean.’

She had stomach pains and frequent headaches. She lacked energy - but energy cannot be expected of a Ryan. She ‘jst didn’t feel good anywhere at all, it comes and goes, really’.

This affliction was not only June’s; it was known to a good many of us.

Vague aches and pains; indispositions that came and went, but not according to the terms and times prescribed by the physicians; infections that seemed to be from a common source, since they would go through the community like an epidemic, but not with an epidemic’s uniformity - they demonstrated their presence in different symptoms with every victim; rashes that did not seem to have any cause; nervous diseases that could end in bouts of insanity or produce tics or paralyses; tumours and skin diseases; aches and pains that ‘wandered’ about the body; new diseases altogether that for a time were categorized with the old ones for lack of information until it became clear that these
were
new diseases; mysterious deaths; exhaustions and listlessness that kept people lying about or in bed for weeks and caused relatives and even themselves to use the words
malinger
and
neurotic
and so on but then, suddenly vanishing, released the poor sufferers from criticism and self-doubt. In short there had been for a long time a general increase in illness, both traditional and newly evolved, and if June complained of ‘just not feeling good anywhere, do you see what I mean?’ - then we did, for it was common enough to be classed as a recognizable illness in itself. June decided to move in with us, ‘for a few days’, she said, but what she needed was to evade the pressures, psychological or otherwise, of Gerald’s household, and Emily and I knew, if June did not, that she would have liked to leave there altogether.

I offered the big sofa in the living-room to June, but she preferred a mattress on Emily’s floor, and even, I think, slept on it, though of course I wondered. Silently wondered. Too often had I experienced a sharp, shocked reaction to questions asked innocently. I really did not know if Emily
and June would consider lesbianism as the most normal thing in the world, or as improper. Styles in morals had changed so sharply and so often in my lifetime, and were so different in various sections of the community, that I had learned long ago to accept whatever was the norm for that particular time and place. I rather believe that the two girls slept in each other’s arms for comfort. Of course I could have no doubt, after what Emily had told me, about how she must feel now she had the child, her ‘real friend’, alone with her there. Almost alone - there was me and there was Hugo. But at least there weren’t so many others around all the time.