Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

“All right, if you’ve decided, we’ll continue without you,” Greybeard said. “Watch your belongings, that’s all I say.”

“We don’t like leaving you, Greybeard,” Towin said. “And you and Charley can keep that bit of money you owe me.”

“It’s entirely your choice.”

“That’s what I said,” Becky said. “We’re about old enough to take care of ourselves, I should reckon.”

As they were shaking hands all round, bidding each other good-bye, Charley started to hop about and scold.

“This fox has picked up all the fleas in Christendom. Isaac, you’re letting them loose on me, you villain!”

Setting the fox down, he ordered it towards the water. The fox understood what was required of it. It moved backwards into the flood, slowly, slowly, brush first and then the rusty length of its body, and finally its head. Pitt held a lantern so that they could see it better.

“What’s he doing? Is he going to drown himself?” Martha asked anxiously.

“No, Martha, only humans take their own lives,” Charley said. “Animals have got more faith. Isaac knows fleas don’t like cold water. This is his way of getting rid of them. They climb right up his body on to his muzzle, see, to avoid a soaking. You watch him now.”

Only part of the fox’s head was above the water. He sank down until his muzzle alone was showing. Then he ducked under completely. A circle of little fleas was left struggling on the surface. Isaac came up a yard away, bounded ashore, shook himself, and raced round in circles before returning to his master.

“I never saw a smarter trick,” Towin said to Becky, nodding his head, as the others climbed into the boats. “It must be something like that that the world’s doing to human beings, when you work it out — shaking us off its snout.”

“You’re taking a lot of rubbish, Towin Thomas,” she said.

They stood waving as the boats moved slowly away, Towin with his cheeks screwed up to see the particular outline merge with the general gloom.

“Well, there they go,” Charley said, pulling on his paddle. “She’s a sharp-tongued one, but I’m sorry to leave them in such a thieves’ den.”

They were towing Jeff Pitt’s little boat, so that he could be in with them. He said, “Who’s the thieves? It might have been Jingadangelow’s men took our property. On the other hand, I reckon it might just as well have been old Towin. I never did trust him, crafty old blighter.”

“Whoever it was, the Lord will provide for us,” Charley said. He bent his back and guided his paddle deeper into the sedgy waters.

In the first dreary days at Sparcot, when the rabble cast up there were forming into a community and the disease-ridden summer broke into a rain-swept autumn, Charley Samuels had not realized for some while that he knew the big man with the high bald head and growing beard. It was a time when everyone was more alert for enemies than friends.

Charley arrived at Sparcot some days after the Timberlanes, and in a dejected state of mind.

His father had owned a small bookshop in a South Coast town. Ambrose Samuels was a man of glooms and tempers. When he was in his most smiling mood, he would read aloud to Mrs. Samuels, the boy Charley, and his two sisters, Ruth and Rachel. He read to them from the thousands of obsolete theological books with which the second floor of the old shop was stocked, or from the works of obsolete and morose poets which sold no better than the theology.

Much of this dead stock thus inevitably passed into Charley’s mind. He could quote it at any later time of life, without knowing who wrote it or when, remembering only that it came from what his father had designated “a gilt-tooled thirty-two-mo” or a “tree’d calf octavo”.

It was a lie. When Charley was eleven, an alarming shock of fate set the thought of death in his heart for ever. In his eleventh year, came the radiation sickness — the result of that deliberate act men called The Accident. His father died of cancer a year later.

The shop was sold. Mrs. Samuels took her children to live in her home town, where she got a secretarial post. Charley went to work when he was fifteen. His mother died three years later.

He took a series of unskilled jobs while trying to act as father to his sisters. That had been in the late eighties and early nineteen-nineties. Compared with what was to come, it was — morally and economically — a fairly stable time. But work became harder to get. He saw his sisters established in good jobs while he was unemployed.

It was the outbreak of war that had the final shaping of him. He was twenty-nine. This madness added to madness, as nations bled themselves fighting over the few children who survived, decided him that there had to be something higher than man if all creation was not a mockery. Only in religion, it seemed to him, lay an antidote to despair. He had himself baptized into the Methodist church — a step that would have enraged his father.

To avoid being called to fight in the war, Charley joined the Infantop Corps, a semi-international branch of Childsweep, dedicated to saving life rather than taking it. At once, he had been swept away from Rachel and Ruth and plunged into the thick of the global struggle. It was then he met Algy Timberlane.

With the revolution and Britain’s retirement from the war in 2005, Charley returned to look after his sisters again. He found to his horror that Ruth and Rachel had taken to prostitution and were prospering. It was all done very discreetly, and they still worked in the afternoon at a nearby shop. Charley closed down part of his mind, settled in with them, and defended them where and when he could.

He became the glorified chucker-out of their thriving establishment. For under the Coalition and later the United governments, hard times came with a vengeance. The world was crumbling into senescence and chaos. But what the sisters supplied remained a necessity. They flourished until the cholera stalked through England.

Charley prised his sisters away from their stricken town and headed into the country with them. Rachel and Ruth did not protest; they had seen enough from their vantage point to scare them. A client dying on the stairs precipitated them into the little car Charley bought with his war savings.

Outside the town, the car expired. They found a nylon stocking rammed into the oil sump. They began to walk, carrying their bundles on their backs on a road that led — though they did not know it — to Sparcot. Many other refugees went by that way.

It was a gruesome exodus. Among the genuine travellers were bandits who set upon their fellows, cut their throats, and took their belongings. Another robber went that way; it crept through the blood, burst out on the brow, was interested only in taking life. It stole up on Ruth in the first night and on Rachel in the third, and left them face upwards in the mounds of humus over which Charley raised crosses made with sticks from the dusty hedgerows.

When he limped into the doubtful shelter of Sparcot (helping a woman called Iris whom he would find strength to marry eighteen months later), Charley was a man turned in on himself. He had no wish to interest himself in the world again. In his wounded heart, the sudden dread had found a permanent billet.