Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

Turning back, Charteris cast a perfunctory eye over the furnishings of the room. They were all horrible. The bed was specially designed for chastity and early rising.

‘Combien?’

The girl told him. Two thousand six hundred and fifty francs. He had to have the figure repeated. His French was rusty and he was not used to the French government’s recent devaluation.

‘I’ll take it. Are you from Metoz?’

‘I’m Italian.’

Pleasure rose in him, a sudden feeling of gratitude that not all good things had been eroded. In this rotten stuffy room, it was as if he breathed again the air of the mountains.

‘I’ve been living in Italy since the war, right down in Catanzaro,’ he told her in Italian.

She smiled. ‘I am from the south, from Calabria, from a little village in the mountains that you won’t have heard of.’

‘Tell me. I might have done. I was doing NUNSACS work down there. I got about.’

She told him the name of the village and he had not heard of it. They laughed.

‘But I have not heard of NUNSACS,’ she said. ‘It is a Calabrian town? No?’

He laughed again, chiefly for the pleasure of doing it and seeing its effect on her. ‘NUNSACS is a New United Nations organisation for settling and if possible rehabilitating war victims. We have several large encampments down along the Ionian Sea.’

The girl was not listening to what he said. ‘You speak Italian well but you aren’t Italian. Are you German?’

‘I’m Montenegrin – a Jugoslav. Haven’t been home since I was a boy. Now I’m driving over to England.’

As he spoke, he heard Madame calling impatiently. The girl moved towards the door, smiled at him – a sweet and shadowy smile that seemed to explain her existence – and was gone.

Charteris put his case down on the table under the window. He stood looking out for a long while at the dry canal bed, the detritus in it making it look like an archaeological dig that had uncovered remains of an earlier industrial civilisation.

Madame was working in the bar when he went down. Several of the little tables in the room were occupied. He could tell at a glance they were all local people. The room was large and dispiriting, the big dark wood bar on one side being dwarfed and somehow divorced from the functions it was supposed to serve. A television set flickered in one corner, most of those present contriving to sit and drink so that they kept an eye on it, as if it were an enemy or at least an uncertain friend. The only exceptions to this were two old men at a table set apart, who talked industriously, resting their wrists on the table but using their hands to emphasise points in the conversation. One of these men, who grew a tiny puff of beard under his lower lip, soon revealed himself as M’sieur.

Behind M’sieur’s table, and set in one corner by a radiator, was a bigger table, a solemn table, spread with various articles of secretarial and other use. This was Madame’s table, and to this she retired to work with some figures when she was not serving her customers. Tied to the radiator was a large and mangy young dog, who whined at intervals and flopped continually into new positions, as though the floor had been painted with anti-dog powder. Madame occasionally spoke mildly to it, but her interests were clearly elsewhere.

All this Charteris took in as he sat at a table against the wall, sipping a pernod, waiting for the girl to appear. He saw these people as victims of an unworkable capitalistic system dying on its feet. The girl came after some while from an errand in the back regions, and he motioned her over to his table.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Angelina.’

‘Mine’s Charteris. That’s what I call myself. It’s an English name. I’d like to take you out for a meal.’

‘I don’t leave here till late – ten o’clock.’

‘Then you don’t sleep here?’

Some of the softness went out of her face as caution, even craftiness, overcame her, so that momentarily he thought, she’s just another lay, but there will be endless complications to it in this set-up, you can bet! She said, ‘Can you buy some cigarettes or something? I know they’re watching me.’

He shrugged. She walked across to the bar. Charteris watched the movement of her legs, the action of her buttocks, trying to estimate whether her knickers would be clean or not. He was a fastidious man. Angelina fetched down a packet of cigarettes, put them on a tray, and carried them across to him. He took them and paid without a word. All the while, the M’sieur’s eyes were on him.

Charteris forced himself to smoke one of the cigarettes. They were vile. Despite her neutrality in the Acid Head War, France had suffered from shortages like everyone else. Charteris was pampered, with illegal access to NUNSACS cigars, which he enjoyed.

He looked at the television. Faces swam in the green light, talking too fast for him to follow. There was some nonsense about a cycling champion, a protracted item about a military parade and inspection, shots of international film stars dining in Paris, something about a murder hunt somewhere. Not a mention of the two continents full of nut cases who no longer knew where reality began or ended. The French carried their neutrality into every facet of their lives.

When he had finished his pernod, he went over and paid Madame at her table and walked out in the square.

It was night, night in its early stages when the clouds still carried hints of daylight through the upper air. The floodlighting was gaining on the cathedral, chopping it into alternate vertical sections of void and glitter, so that it looked like a cage for some gigantic prehistoric bird. Beyond the cage, the traffic on the motorway snarled untiringly.

He went and sat in his car and smoked a cigar to remove the taste of the cigarette, although sitting in the Banshee when it was still made him oddly uneasy. He thought about Angelina and whether he wanted her, decided on the whole he did not. He wanted English girls. He had never even known one but, since his earliest days, he had longed for all things English, as another man he knew yearned for anything Chinese. He had dropped his Montenegrin name to christen himself with the surname of his favourite English writer.

About the present state of England, he imagined he had no illusions. When the Acid Head War broke out between the US and China, Russia had come in on the Communist side. Canada and Australia had aligned themselves with America, and Britain – perhaps still nourishing dreams of a grander past – had backed into the war in such a way as to offend her allies while at the same time involving most of the other European nations, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia amongst them – and France always excluded. By an irony, Britain had been the first country to suffer the PCA Bomb – the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that spread hallucinatory mental states across the nation. As a NUNSACS official, Charteris was being posted to work in Britain on rehabilitation work; as a NUNSACS official, he knew the terrifying disorder he would find there. He had no qualms about it.

But first there was this evening to be got through … He had said that so often to himself. Life was so short, one treasured it so intensely, and yet it was also full of desolating boredom. The acid head victims all ever the world had no problems with boredom; their madnesses precluded it; they were always well occupied with terror or joy, whichever their inner promptings led them to; that was why one envied the victims one spent one’s life trying to save. The victims were never tired of themselves.

The cigar tasted good, extending its mildness all round him like a mist. Now he put it out and climbed from the car. He knew of only two ways to pass the evening before it was time to sleep; he could eat or he could find sexual companionship. Sex, he thought, the mysticism of materialism. It was true. He sometimes needed desperately the sense of a female life impinging on his with its unexplored avenues and possibilities, so stale, so explored, were his own few reactions. Back to his mind again came the riotous movements of the autostrada victims, fornicating with death.