Christine Brooke-Rose - The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

— if you don’t mind.

— No, I don’t mind.

— … big idea?

— I don’t know, but it’s all got to be taken up, Mr. Swaminathan said.

— Hey, stop hammering when you talk. I can’t hear you.

— Mr. Swaminathan said it’s all got to be taken up, and that wall’s going to be knocked down too.

— Yeah, I heard, but why all …

— I suppose the bathroom alone isn’t big enough.

— Hey? Stop hammering. You’ve got no …

— I know, I’ve been told that before. I can hear myself though, and I can hear you through my hammering.

— … Vocational Training.

— Surely you’re too young to have gone through the Resettlement Camp?

— What you talking about? Stop hammering. What Resettlement Camp?

— I thought you said you’d had Vocational Training.

— Voice training, stoopid. I don’t usually do this kinda work, I’m a anger. They like us as singers, you know. Quaint you see, oldey worldey.

When you love somebody

Forget it

The hammering has the high-pitched ring of metal on metal, one hammer hitting the chisel on the beat, the other slightly off the beat. The voice is completely audible through the hammering and is charged with an aggressive gaiety not at all present in the languorous snarl of the speaking voice. The gaiety is not infectious.

When you want somebody

Scrap it

Oh, whe-he-hen you gotta ye-he-hen

Turn it in

The long metal chisel is hammered in some fifteen centimetres under the pink marble slab. The size of the pieces into which the marble slab breaks varies in direct ratio to the angle at which the chisel is held from the floor. The more horizontally the chisel can be held, the larger the pieces. But the chisel can be held horizontally only when inserted either, as at the Start, from inside the edge of the sunken bath, or, as now, from a side where another slab has already been removed, so that the chisel is being held at a level with the under-flooring. Between two slabs the chisel must be held almost vertically and tapped very gently into the dividing line. The singer does not tap gently.

— … get to the wall, then it won’t be so easy.

— Oh I don’t know, they’ll be free of access on one side.

— Stop hammering I can’t hear a word you say.

— I said they’d be free of access on this side. The really hard ones were the first.

— Yeah and I did more’n you did of those.

The singer holds his chisel obliquely and cracks the slabs into smaller pieces. He pauses a great deal.

— I wonder what they’re gonna do with all those pieces.

— I don’t know. A pink terrace in crazy pavement, perhaps.

— Stop hammering you old loony.

— A pink terrace in crazy pavement.

— Say, you’re in the know, ain’t you? Who you in with?

— That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on –

— What you saying?

Mr. Swaminathan stands in the pink marble bathroom and sways gently from one foot to another. Mr. Swaminathan paces up and down the pink marble bathroom, counting his own steps. The foreman does not pace up and down but advances cautiously from one two-metre distance of his measuring-rule to the next. He is a tall Asswati, taller and handsomer than Mr. Swaminathan. He has delegated the crouching measurements around the bath and coppershell washstands to the young Colourless worker who hums as he measures, but apparently jots nothing down. The bathroom measures about six metres by eight by four. It is bare of towels, sponges, soaps, jars, bottles, pots, brushes. The rails and racks for these things merge into the pink marble walls or floor, imperceptibly breaking their surface with hollows and curves. Mr. Swaminathan’s eyes strike an atonal chord. The bathroom window, at eye level, is about two metres wide, and half a metre high, almost wholly filled with a sky intensely blue. From this position, three steps away and to the left, only the distance to the right can be seen, the sea of olive groves and the Settlement of dark brown shacks like flies regimented on a flat patch of ground. Just beyond the Settlement the town sprawls in a sunlit haze, tall where it is not squat, grey where it is not golden.

— with the wall, d’you think? I’m talking to you.

— I’m sorry, Mr. Swaminathan. I was trying to pick out my house.

— Yes, well I haven’t got all day. Hmm. You-er-live in the Colourless Settlement? I gather the bungalows are very comfortable. One per mated capita now, isn’t it? That’s a wonderful improvement. There’s nothing like that in the town, well I suppose you know, the overcrowding there is insoluble. And as for the big cities –

— Gee, I know some people’d call ’em shacks.

— Well, that’s a matter of opinion. They were built by Colourless people in the first place, weren’t they, admittedly a very long while ago, for holidays, before the er –

— Well says the tall Asswati foreman I think we’d better leave them to get on with it and deal with the wall when my two builders come back. After all the marble has to be removed before it’s knocked down.

Mr. Swaminathan’s eyes strike an atonal chord, confusing the neural cells which complain by discharging a high mad microvoltage. It is not, however, his eyes which do this but the memory of his eyes having possibly done so, or the psychic presence, now hammered into by the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. A recording engineer might perhaps separate the components of the mixture. If the hammering were extracted, the lost sentences that came and went and returned in reconstructed form might be recovered and heard. The internal conversation, however, is too intimately compounded with the sentences that came and went to be separated by mechanical means. Except perhaps by bombardment with beta-particles.

— Well I’m tired, I guess we can have a rest now.

— But we’ve only done a fraction of it.

The marble slab has come away entire, without breaking at all.

— Hey, have you seen the view from this window? We’re quite high up, considering.

— Considering what?

— Oh, I dunno. Considering it’s a bathroom and all.

— Don’t you think we should try and get as far as that wall? They’re always accusing us of being lazy. Mr. Swaminathan might come up any minute.

— Say, you’re a dadda’s boy, ain’t yer? Mr. Swami this and Mr. Swami that. You got a yen for him or what? You listen to me, you gotta go slow, go slow in everything you do for ’em, otherwise it’s a mug’s game. What’s all this for, anyway?

— Mr. Swaminathan said something about a hair-dressing salon for guests at the big ball.

— Did he now? Big ball, eh? Hey, there’ll be extra servants needed, won’t there, butlers and drink servers, you know, circulating. And hairdressers, right here in the pink marble. Well, hairdressers’ assistants anyway. D’you think we’d stand a chance?

— I thought you said you were a singer?

— Yeah, well, not exactly. I go to night-school, see. I’m waiting for the big time. I take on jobs like this ’cos I can keep my voice in while I work. Oh boy when the big time comes! It’s all a question of luck. Being heard at the right moment by the right person. That’s discovery.

— You mean you’d sing while handing out champagne or shampooing ladies’ hair?

— Well. You never know. Oh boy, to get my fingers lathering and scratching in all that thick black hair. D’you think they’d take me on?

— I don’t know, what are you registered as?

— Yes, what are you registered as?

— Oh, hi-yer boss. We were just having a wine-break. No wine though.

— I asked, what are you registered as?

— I’m all things to all men I guess.