D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘Klutzy clothes?’ she asked. ‘You want klutzy clothes?’

Katherine knew she was being played for a tourist. It was an insult worse than ‘See you next Tuesday.’

‘I can think of nothing more horrible,’ she said stiffly, and then heard herself, and tried to smile. ‘You see, I need things that’ll last more than a day or two. I’m hoping to change camps. If you’ll have me.’

‘If you don’t fit you won’t stay. It’s as simple as that.’

Katherine had no intention of fitting. Or of staying. What she needed was a disguise that would last out her time.

Klutzy clothes were what tourists brought back and wore to parties.

She chose a reddish-brown robe belted with a long plait of soft Oriental hair, an under-robe of quilted terylene, and a hooded ski-troops survival jacket. Glengarry golfing socks, clogs, sun-goggles, and a necklace of sharpened steel disks (for tight corners, the fat young woman said), completed her outfit.

Other stall-holders gathered around to give advice. Her hair would give her away until it had grown, they said, and hiding it under the ski hood would be uncomfortable if the warm weather kept up. So she added a yellow plastic sou’wester. She’d need a sleeping bag, they said, so she chose one that zipped around and doubled as a holdall… The bill came to nearly a hundred and fifty pounds.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

The fat young woman crossed her hands piously over her uniformed breasts. ‘Changing camps is never cheap,’ she said.

‘But you believe money isn’t important.’

‘But you’re the one who’s paying. And you believe it is.’

‘So?’

‘Gesture of solidarity.’

‘Barefaced extortion.’

The fat young woman lowered her hands, hooked her thumbs in her leather belt. ‘We’re on Benefit. You’re on salary.’

‘Not anymore, I’m not.’

‘We bleed for you.’

The crowd around them laughed. The stranger’s bulging handbag obviously contained enough, and more, or she wouldn’t be holding it so tightly against her stomach. Katherine suddenly wondered why she was humiliating herself in front of these people. Harry would hardly grudge her one fifty out of his three hundred thousand.

She paid with no further argument. The crowd applauded with friendly irony. She packed her new purchases into the sleeping bag holdall and started to walk away. After she had gone perhaps ten paces the fat young woman in the policeman’s uniform called after her and, unwisely, she looked back. She saw the young woman peel a few notes off the bundle she had given her and put them in her pocket. The rest she fanned out in one hand. ‘We have been visited,’ she shouted, and tossed the bank notes into the air.

Nobody scrambled. They stood silently watching, and if a note fluttered within reach they caught it. There was a ritual quality about their action. Many notes blew away on an updraft over the shacks and gimmicky hovels for others to find.

Katherine turned angrily and strode away. The woman’s gesture had been vulgar and pretentious. The whole place was vulgar and pretentious. She betted that once she was out of sight the people would be down on their knees, grubbing for her money on the littered, filthy concrete. Except that she knew she’d lose her bet.

Her departure was followed with the same polite interest as her arrival had been. Nobody molested her, or spoke to her other than occasionally to suggest that she should care… And she did care. She cared very much. She cared furiously that society in its idleness should find it cheaper and easier to subsidize these thousands of freakish, self-indulgent misfits, rather than educate them to reality. It made her life of honest endeavor, and Harry’s, suddenly pointless and quite unnecessary.

The children had gone from the truck dump. She let herself out through the double doors of the container and walked away down the desolate road. She was angry, and a rigor was gathering, and her anger was without justification. The connections in her mind were hers — not good or bad, noble or ignoble, simply hers. That she should be jealous of these vulgar, idle, pretentious, stupid, childish, immoral people was intolerable… The walk back into taxi country was long. The tightness around her scalp increased, so that when she passed a parked car she thought of asking the man in it for a lift, at least as far as the nearest main thoroughfare. But she couldn’t have borne to have a paralysis, or even a rigor, inside his tidy motorcar. Besides, he was asleep, his face hidden in the gray-green pillow of his jacket, folded up and tucked under his head. So she didn’t look (don’t look, dear) and walked on by.

The holdall was heavy, and she was thankful when she came to proper streets and could rest on it by the curb and wait. Once she had adopted her new persona taxis would decline to notice her. So she sat very straight and neat, with her knees together, a thoroughly respectable and industrious woman. The rigor, when it came, was mild, and she sat up straight and neat throughout it. When it had passed she leaned sideways to unzip the holdall and get out her handbag. The tag of the zip was awkward. Concentrating, she discovered that the difficulty was more with her fingers. She saw the strange way they moved: they struck bluntly against each other and lost direction. Nevertheless, with patience and perseverance she was still able to make them open the zip and get out her handbag.

By the time a taxi came along this difficulty too had passed. Working the taxi door handle was easy, so delightfully easy. The driver never looked around, simply hunched in his seat and went where she asked him to, whistling off pitch in a way that normally would have made her want to scream. But she worked her hands, opening and shutting her handbag, and hardly even noticed. She went first to the central heliport where she squeezed her new holdall into a left luggage locker, and then hurried home to Harry. She owed him something. All the way from the heliport and then up in the elevator to their flat she tried to think what.

I was taken to police headquarters, my detention, they said, no more than a formality. They were nice enough, in a barbed sort of way, but they stuck to their formality. The magistrate who could authorize Christopher Barber’s release on nominal bail was not available until the morning. It being a somewhat delicate matter they didn’t like to bother the duty magistrate who might be less… sympathetic. Less bloody corrupt, I thought, and sighed for my own ingratitude.

To be locked in a cell can be pretty rough, even for the ordinary citizen who closes his eyes and shuts it all out, and even gets a bit of sleep maybe. But for me, refugeless, it was murder. I took my relaxants, my wonderful, wonderful sleep surrogates, and lay down on my bunk, and prepared for the long night. The ceiling of my cell, like the walls, was made of steel plates like the hull of an antique battleship, so I planned to pass the time by counting the rivets. I knew that if I kept this up for long enough my mind would move off somewhere else, leaving my eyes to tick mechanically to and fro, back and across. In that way a sort of dazzled unawareness would come, and even dreams. It took concentration, and often it didn’t work, and mostly I didn’t bother to try, but when I did try and it did come, it was like everything you’ve ever read about home. It was so gentle. It was where I belonged but could never stay.

I started the night not too badly, even optimistically. I had counted rivets for about half an hour and the edges of my mind were just beginning to soften, when they turned the lights off. I should have reckoned on this, of course: this wasn’t a political jail: prisoners here were allowed their beauty, their sanity sleep. But in fact the sudden total darkness caught me unprepared. It was for a moment incomprehensible, an experience only dimly remembered, one that might signify anything: death, destruction, the coming of God. I lay stunned, unable to move, hearing in the new silence, the dark silence, hearing the blood beating in my ears. Then the two tiny pains started, and I made the connection, and remembered the flashlight left in the pocket of my overturned car.