Brian Aldiss - Ruins

As he walked by the bath with these and similar thoughts in his mind, his gaze on the sky, the moon, at the extreme end of his walk before he turned about, appeared to become entangled in the bare branches of an ash tree.

So greatly did this sight move Billing that he stumbled back inside the house, as if he could bear no more loveliness.

He thought of that loveliness again after he and Rose had made love, after he turned the light off and darkness filled their little room. In his present complacent state, he realised, he had had no dreams he remembered for some while. Nothing, except the nightmare provoked by George Dwyer’s flung brick. It was as though the moon had not shone on his sleep.

The pale moonlight was already at their window panes. Humbling himself, Billing carefully formed words like a prayer in his mind: ‘Oh, Anima, I believe in you. Visit me, speak to me, in my dreams tonight, fair creature.’

On waking, he knew the Anima was alive in his mind, almost as tangible as Rose’s head on the adjacent pillow. She was there, leaving only as his eyes opened. She spoke to him.

What she said was: ‘ Your parents loved you all along .’

Billing rose in a daze and went into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, feeling his face. Letting water run into the bath, he went and sat in it naked. He sighed, shook his head, marvelled.

It was the truth. Something had responded to his entreaties. He never doubted for one moment that she – fickle though she might be – had visited him, had spoken – and of course had spoken truth. Undeniable Anima, undeniable truth.

Lying back in the water gasping, he clasped the soap like a heart to his chest. Yes, yes, she had spoken! He was in communication with himself. The psyche had made a true dream journeying and returned from it with treasure. His parents loved him.

His father loved him. All these years, the ghost of his father, of that falling ladder, had not been laid. In his childish mind, he had seen himself as either the subject or the object of the accident, as responsible for it, or as purposely injured by it. He had held the belief that his father died to punish him. Somehow the poisonous error had always lodged within him like a wound.

Of course that was nonsense. His father loved him. His Anima declared it.

Again the ladder was falling. Again he heard his father’s hoarse cry for help. Then the smash of ladder and body against the concrete walk. He was running towards the smash, crying for his father not to be hurt. His father made no reply – his father who loved him.

It was all clear. He could recall it all for the first time. The fearful blankness had gone.

And his mother came running, pushing him away in her fright, clasping his father’s body.

He remembered it all. The weeping that followed. Weeks of weeping. His helplessness. His guilt. The funeral to which his mother thought it best not to allow him to go. His boyish agony over that: as if he had been turned away from the very grave. And all the time she and his father had loved him. Their dear son, their dear only son.

The joy could no longer be withstood. With a great shout, he jumped out of the bath and rushed into the bedroom, naked and dripping, to the sleeping Rose.

‘A miracle, a miracle!’ he shouted. ‘Rose, wake up.’

She sat up and threw back the bedclothes.

‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you daft bugger.’

Brian Aldiss OBE was a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. Born in Norfolk in 1925, after leaving the army Aldiss worked as a bookseller which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work, the story ‘Criminal Record’, appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Passing away in 2017, over the course of his life Aldiss wrote nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories – becoming one of the pre-eminent science fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

When the Feast is Finished

Finches of Mars

Report on Probability A

The Malacia Tapestry

The Male Response

Walcot

The Primal Urge

Brothers of the Head

Enemies of the System

Comfort Zone

Eighty Minute Hour

Jocasta: Wife and Mother

The Brightfount Diaries

Super-State

A Chinese Perspective

Life in the West

Forgotten Life

Remembrance Day

Somewhere East of Life

The Hand-Reared Boy

A Soldier Erect

A Rude Awakening

Dracula Unbound

Frankenstein Unbound

Moreau’s Other Island

The Complete Short Stories: The 1950S

The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 1)

The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 2)

The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 3)

The Complete Short Stories: The 1960S (Part 4)

The Complete Short Stories: The 1970S (Part 1)

The Complete Short Stories: The 1970S (Part 2)

Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s

The Twinkling of an Eye

Collected Essays

This World and Nearer Ones

Pale Shadow of Science

The Detached Retina

And the Lurid Glare of the Comet

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First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Hutchinson, an imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 1987

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