Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

His tears scattered. Once they had had a goose to fatten and in the long blight of summer where the damsons festered it made some company with its simple ways not unapproachable. Once her mother brought it out a bucket of water in the heat for it to duck over and over its long head and flail its pruned wings with pleasure scattering the drops across small Angeline. She heard the wings flail now as out she crept nostalgic for the gormless bird they later ate.

At last she came back wearily to where a broken Stella Art sign buzzed and burned in the desolation of their parking lot. She stood there in a wet shift breathing. Under the mauve and maureen flash her face showed like a shuttered street from which might crawl iguaneous things. But just a mental block away where she only blindly knew directions a lane stood in old summer green some place like a magic garden where a young barefoot girl might drive her would-be swans and never think of harsher either-ors.

A small rain filled the incommense thoroughfares of night but still among the guttering buggies stilled tangents of smoke and rib-roofed skeletombs a guitar string or flute fought loneliness with loneliness and a poppied light or naked carbulb gave the flowerdpeople nightpower. Oh Phil the small dogs howl don’t ask me what I’m doing on the health Col. She plashes the raddlepuddles in a dim blue fermentation. A round of vestal voices plays noughts and crosses her subterranean path with a whole sparse countryside rumpling the stone-trees. Such shadows in her way she brushes off knowing the nets that await her in the shallows of a nightsunk city. She crounches and pees by old brickhaps. Oh don’t be pregnant in this tupturned world!

Sickly still bedummied by the ill winds she staggered through her own grotesquely shatteredporch to find the blanket cold and stiff and Charteris not in. Groping with all menaces she unsandaled herself and beneath crawled heavily. Charteris not in not in the starve-in still? Small sound not rain not dogs reached her and immediate anxieties peopled the grotto with haggard dimmies half in flight with speed as closing in on her she propped and stared. Even hoping-fearing it might be Ruby Dymond?

In the corner Marta only sniffing on a broken chair, lumpkin in the fluttered darklight with her crushed appeal.

‘Get to bed girl!’

‘The toad is going to get me pushing up my thinghs.’

‘Go to sleep stop worrying till tomorrow. The holed world’s had enough tonight.’

‘But throbbing toadspower! It’s trying to force my skull up and climb into my barn my grain and then motor me away to some awful slimy pool of toadstales!’

‘You’re dreaming! Pack it in!’

Laying down her tawdry head she tucked her motherless eyelids on her cheeks and took herself far away from drivniks a goosegirl in an old summer lane drove her would-be-swans barefoot And cellos hit a seldom chord.

Every day Charteris like a bird of prayer spoke to new crowds finding new things to say giving outwards and never sleeping never tired sustained by his overiding fantasy. Two three days passed so at the big starve-in for Belgium’s famine or Germany’s bad news. He sat with a can of beans that Cass and Cass’s buddy Buddy Docre had brought him half-forking them into his mouth and smilingly half-listening to some disciples who parrited back at him a loose interpretation of what they had gleaned in all enthusiasm.

When he had filled his crop enough he rose slowly and began to walk slowly so as not to disturb the ripples of the talk from which he slowly wove his own designs half-hearing of the fishernet of feeling. In these famine days they all grew gaunt he especially captain on his scoured bridge his face clawed by multi-colour beard to startling angles and all of them in their walk angular stylised as if they viewed themselves from a crow’s nest distanced. Partly this walk was designed to keep their flapping shoes on their feet and to avoid the litter in the lands stirred by thin breezes breaking: for they had now camped here three unmoving days or weeks and were a circus for the citizens who brought them wine and clothes and sometimes cake.

Charteris kept his gaze steady as hair hid his eyes in the wind hover.

Cass said gently to him almost singing, ‘This evening is our great triumphal entry, Master, when we break at last from this poor rookery and the lights of Brussels will welcome you and show your film and turn the prized town over to you. We have prepared the ground well and your followers flock in by hundreds. There is no need to motor farther for here we have a fine feathered Jerusalem where you will be welcome for ever.’

Sometimes he did not say all that he thought. Privately he said to himself, ‘While under the lid the finger is still to Frankfurt how shall we do more than park overnight in Belgium? How can Cass be so blind he does not see that if there is no trip there is nothing? He must be eyeless with purpose.’

So he swooped down upon the field of truth that Cass and Buddy pushed and that Cass like Angeline had no habit in his dark draper suit. Behind his shutters he saw bright-lit Cro-Magnons fearful in feathers and brutally flowered hunt the ponderous Neanderthal through fleet bush and drive them off and decimate them: not for hatred or violence but because it was the natural order and he uttered, ‘Predelic man must leave our caves as we reach each valley.’

‘Caves! Here’s a whole hogging city ours for the carve-in!’ said blind Cass. But there were those present who dug the Master and soon this casually important word of His went round and new attitudes were born in the bombsites and a solitary zither taking up this hunting song was joined by other instruments. And the world sailed too amid the Master’s brainwaves.

Leaving the others aside, he stylised himself back to his ruined roost where Angeline sat with her back curved to the light unspeaking.

‘After the film tonight all possibilities say we flit,’ he told her.

She did not look up.

‘Leave the will open to all winds and the right one blows. This is the multi-valued choice that we should snarl on and no more middle here.’ Echoing his words the first engine broke air as crude maintenance started for the farther trek; soon blue smoke ripped farting across the acid perimeters as more and more switched on.

Still she had no face for him.

‘You’re escaping, Colin, why don’t you face the truth about yourself? It’s not a positive decision – you’re leaving because you know that what I say about Cass and the others is a whole sparky truth and you hope to shake them off, don’t you?’

‘After this film and the adulation we flit on a head-start. Maybe a preach-in.’ He fumbled and half-lit a half-smoked cigar with an old fouled furcoat over his shoulder.

She stood up facing him more haggard than he. ‘He pushes but you don’t care, Col! You have the word about the Mafia but you don’t care. It was through him Marta died but you don’t care. Whatever happens you don’t care if we all fall dead in our trips!’

He was looking through the cracked pane. Mostly now they sat around with a trance-in going even among the rolling cars. But the beer brigade could caper – one of their plump girls danced now in the steel engraving air of a Jew’s harp slow but sturdy.

‘This place has lost all its loot so we’ll take in my film and then we’ll give it a scan and we’ll blow. Open up another city. Why don’t you dance, Angelpants?’

‘Phil, Robbins, now Marta-oh, you really have lost all loot yourself, man! You wouldn’t care if you got cut dead yourself and to think I stood up for you!’

The cigar wasn’t working. His hand twitched it into a corner, he moved to the door’s gape.

‘You use the old fleshioned terms and feelings, Angle, all extinct with no potentiality. There’s a new thing you aren’t with but I begin to graveL Somewhere Marta got a wrong drug, somewhere she caught hipatitis or pushed herself over. So? It’s down-trip and she had a thing we’ll never know in her mind, a latent death. She was destined and that’s bad We did the best and can’t bind too much if she freaks out.’