Jim Crace - Continent

All that Awni can construct is his letter of thanks. Copies are tacked to the veranda wall. ‘Honoured Minister and Friend, We thank you for the gift of Progress through Electrical Power…’

GOOD TO its word, the government has erected pylons. It has laid cables. It has wired the hospital, the school, government buildings, Nepruolo land. In a few weeks we will have electricity. The Rest House is to be hung with glass lanterns in lemon and green and orange. ‘They will be mangoes of light,’ says Awni. ‘Mangoes of light all along the veranda.’ Electricity becomes familiar to us, domesticated as shining mangoes.

More strange are the electricians, clean workers with hard fingers, who have come from the city in neat trucks and taken up noisy residence in Awni’s best rooms. Hear these men sing and argue as they work! They bury flayed mechanical limbs of wire deep into wall plaster. They handle the tendons and sinews, the long red arteries, the blue veins, with the intimacy of surgeons. The children stand close to dive and wrestle for snips of wire and plastic which fall to the ground. How will it be, they ask, when the Minister and the President of the Company arrive to switch on the current? Will the electricity flow like water, first lighting dull lamps and spinning slow fans close to the generator, then running through those thin and shiny filaments to the police station, the school, along the Rest House veranda — mango by mango — until it reaches the hospital to drip and spurt, like a farmer’s furthest tap, amongst the sickbeds? Not like water, explain the electricians. ‘But strong and all at once.’

The children do not understand. How can electricity be instantaneous, no sooner in the town centre than on its fringes? How can it be so heedlessly rapid when it has been so slow, when it has taken so many years to reach us here at all?

‘Which is nearest to your brain, your nose or your arse?’ tease the electricians. Children slap their noses. ‘But which can you twitch first? Let’s race. Boys, be noses; girls, be bums. And when we say Now send a message from your brain, to twitch and shake. Who will win?’ Boys and girls — and old men, too — twitch and shake. The noses cannot beat the bums. ‘So now you understand,’ say the electricians. ‘It takes exactly as long for a message to travel from here to here’ (an electrician’s fingers span the prettiest girl’s face from forehead to nose) ‘as it does from here to here!’ (Now he stoops and stretches, touching her buttocks and head.) ‘Electricity is like that. Like a message from the brain, no sooner sent than received.’ The President of the Company presses a lever and every light on the veranda will shine. The hospital will be bright as soon as the police station. The fan in the schoolhouse will turn no sooner than the wheel of the water pump on Nepruolo land. At home that night, by candlelight, mothers and fathers gravely twitch and shake for their educated children.

‘BEWARE OF electricity,’ says the schoolteacher. ‘You will become addicts.’ His comments are directed at Awni, who has been polishing his mangoes and listing the electrical equipment which he has ordered (cheaply and furtively) from the electricians: a modern icebox, table lamps, a liquidizer for expensive drinks. ‘Kittle beetle,’ he says, but the teacher persists. He has lived in the city; he has travelled abroad and trained in Denmark. He is playful in the European manner, joking but not laughing. He alone in the town has lived with science and light. ‘Beware, beware.’

What must it be like to have sharp, strong light at hand, on the flick of a finger? To have cool fresh air fanning the Dry middays? To have ice in every drink? To be visited, like other towns, by the cinema truck? ‘Addictive,’ repeats the teacher. He recalls for us a day in Denmark. ‘I was reading in the conservatory,’ he says. ‘I was alone in the house. Jens was teaching. Lotte was teaching. Their children, Christoffer and Kirsten, were at school. I was being economical at the request of the Minister of Power, who complained daily in the newspapers and on the television that Danes had become reckless with electricity. All that comforted me was fire, a radio and a reading lamp.’ He shows how the appliances were ranged around him, how leads led to plugs, how plugs fitted tightly into sockets on the Jorgensen walls. He demonstrates with a saucer how the energy disc on the electric meter was spinning as gently as a seed mast, its calibrations individually distinct. The saucer turns precariously on the teacher’s finger.

‘There was nothing I could do,’ he says, ‘to stop that disc from spinning; eating power, eating money.’ If he disconnected the lamp and fire and radio still the flat metal monitor crept anticlockwise, notching up amperes on the digital display. Elsewhere in the Jorgensen home gadgets slumbered, drip-fed by electricity: the fridge, the fish tank, the doorbell, the telephone-answering machine, the yoghurt-maker, the deep-freeze in the garage, the kitchen clock, the water-heater. (With the naming of each item we beg for explanations.) ‘But if I could not stop it,’ he says, ‘then I could make it go fast. One flick at the side of the electric fire with my toe. More heat! And the energy disc begins to trot. What fun we would have when the children came home. Christoffer, Kirsten and I had devised an experiment.’

At last the twins returned from school. Christoffer was apprehensive. (What if his parents arrived mid-escapade?) Kirsten was overexcited and impatient. She wished to begin immediately, haphazardly. ‘But I insisted on scientific strategy and order,’ says the schoolmaster. ‘We started in our own rooms and worked outwards and downwards to the spinning disc in the conservatory. Everything electric, from the lights to typewriters, we set in motion.’ He traces a quickening circle in the air with a chalky finger. He grins at the memory. The energy disc was gaining speed. Bedside lamps, electric blankets, convector heaters, a tape-recorder, a train set, a sewing machine. The downstairs rooms were the most prized. Kirsten was the first to lay claim to the clamorous appliances in the toilet and the laundry room. The washing-machine embarked upon its longest, most warlike cycle. The tumble-dryer barrelled a tornado of hot air. The water-heater catered silently for pipes. Towel-rails and steam-irons shared overloaded sockets with sun-lamps and electric toothbrushes. Kirsten was too small to reach the toiletry cabinet. The schoolteacher was summoned. He opened it and handed down her father’s shaver and her mother’s hair-dryer. They dangle-danced from their high socket on springing cords, bouncing, blowing and chewing at the bathroom rug.

Christoffer was busy in the Jorgensen living room. ‘Table lamp, standard lamp, fire, television,’ he yelled, patiently turning silence into buzz and buzz into roar. ‘Stereo, video, radio.’ And then, to the shudder of a rudimentary, over-amplified chord, ‘Guitar!’

Now they hurried to reach the kitchen: cooker, toaster, mixer, grinder, blender, carver, polisher, sweeper, dishwasher, kettle. Another radio, another fire, another small television set. Fountain. Fairy lights. At last, they were done. Together, they dispatched the garden mower down the lawn. At the extent of its lead, it tugged and growled at the free, long grass beyond its reach, like a tethered, liverish goat. The house and garden were a powered cauldron of heat and light and sound.

How did the spinning disc survive this onslaught? The teacher lowers his voice and leans forward to tell. ‘It had disappeared,’ he says. ‘It was moving so fast that we could no longer see it. I climbed on a chair and tried to view it from above. But no, nothing. Only the faint smell of scorched metal and a cloudy smoking of the glass.’ This is the point — with the teacher high on the chair, the twins holding their ears and laughing, the Jorgensen home clamouring like a nightmare — where Jens and Lotte returned. ‘We screamed our explanations. We retraced our routes and unplugged. We picked the fibres from the shaver; we unpicked the keys of typewriters; we replaced the scorched towelling on the ironing board; we rewired the lawn-mower; we patched up the burns on Lotte’s hand (she had leaned on the toaster); we apologized to neighbours; we blushed. But, now, here is a mystery. Once the house had cooled and quietened, still the energy disc was missing. The Jorgensens said it must have disintegrated at speed, like a meteorite, and its flaming pieces had fallen into the workings of the meter. Certainly the digits on the amperage counter never budged again. But I can’t accept so prosaic an explanation.’