Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Mary wasn’t.

‘I could eat something,’ Moses said.

‘Go downstairs,’ the old man said to Moses. ‘You’ll find some tins in the kitchen cupboard. Biscuits too, if I remember rightly. Bring them up here. And a couple of forks. This is going to take some time so I think we should eat first.’

Moses ran down the stairs. He edged round the gas-cooker and into the kitchen. The wallpaper (orange and yellow discs) hung limply from the corners of the room. Sheets of newspapers dated 1970 covered most of the brown lino floor. Grease had clogged the transparent plastic air-vent in the window above the sink. Somebody had hurled a stack of dirty washing-up into the rubbish-bin — and none too recently, by the look of it.

The kitchen cupboard had lost both its handles so he had to prise the twin doors open with a carving-knife. The contents of the cupboard were as follows:

The bottom shelf: seventy-seven tins of John West sardines in tomato sauce.

The middle shelf: thirty-nine packets of Embassy Number One filter cigarettes.

The top shelf: a screwdriver, a Christmas card, and one half-eaten packet of Butter Osborne biscuits.

Shaking his head, Moses selected four tins of sardines and lifted down the biscuits. He found two bent forks in the drawer under the sink. He couldn’t see any plates (except for the ones in the rubbish-bin). That was the lot then. He hurried back upstairs.

The two of them were laughing when he walked in. The old man quickly included him. ‘Did you find everything?’

‘Eventually,’ Moses said. He unloaded his supplies on the bed.

Cigarette in mouth, the old man picked up a tin of sardines, tore off the packaging, slipped the key over the metal tab, and deftly unrolled the lid. Then he crushed his cigarette out and reached for a fork. Just by watching him you began to get an idea of how many tins of John West sardines he must have eaten in the past (and how many tins of John West sardines he would probably eat in the future). He ate rapidly but with finesse, spearing whole fish with a single lunge of the fork and inserting them into his already revolving jaws. Drops of tomato sauce splashed on to his beard and lay there glistening like berries. When he had finished he put the two empty tins on the windowsill behind him, wiped his fingers on the sheet, and lit a cigarette. The meal had taken him slightly less than three minutes.

‘Now then,’ he began, and the efficiency with which he had disposed of his sardines carried over into his voice, ‘you asked me a question. You asked me what was wrong with the village.’ He suppressed a smile. ‘I could answer that question with one simple word. Can either of you guess what that word might be?’

Both Moses and Mary shook their heads.

‘Fear.’ The old man pronounced the word with immense relish. ‘Fear.’ He paused to pick a sliver of fish from between his teeth. He seemed, at the same time, to be savouring the taste of the word. ‘But that is to begin at the end,’ he went on. ‘It has taken me a good forty years to arrive at that simple conclusion. And before you can arrive there, you have to know everything. Or almost everything. If you want to understand completely, that is. So what I’m going to do now, if you’re agreed, is to give you a brief history of New Egypt. The history I started once, but never finished. And remember one thing: nobody — and I mean nobody — has ever heard this before.’

And so he began to talk.

And they perched on their hard chairs and watched the slow upward trickle of smoke from his constant stream of cigarettes.

The sun strained through the cloudy windows. The afternoon faded.

They listened to his voice.

A voice roughened by years of chainsmoking and loneliness, but an articulate voice because he had, in his time, delivered lectures in the village hall and sung in the church choir.

A voice issuing from a mass of filthy sheets and crushed cigarette packets and empty sardine tins.

*

He described the people of New Egypt. Their limited horizons. Their inbreeding. Their sterility. He dissected them without pity, without prejudice. He threw their organs around on his bloody marble slab. He showed how apathy was like castration, how it had made them impotent. All his frustrations, all those months of silence (‘You’re the first people I’ve spoken to since August’), came spilling out. His concave hands scooped at the soupy air like ladles. His beard quivered. He had come alive.

His excitement reached a peak when he turned to the subject of the police. The Pharaohs of New Egypt! He exposed their hierarchy, their hypocrisy, their own peculiar brand of fear.

‘It’s their job,’ he explained, ‘to see that the village behaves in an ordered and harmonious way. But how do you define order? If I had to define it, I would say that order is morale, system, purpose. Order is rising at dawn, regular mealtimes, mowing your lawn. Order is brisk trading and a growing population. Order can be heard, for example, in the crying of a newborn baby or the chimes of an ice-cream van. In New Egypt, though, you won’t find any of those things. There is no order. So what do the police do? They’re forced to include in their definition of the word positive actions of any kind. Order is defined as the opposite of apathy. Order is energy, initiative. And it’s in this way that drunkenness, fraud, theft, arson, rape, even murder come to be welcomed by the police as being ultimately beneficial to the community. Something has happened. Somebody has done something. Crime is proof that the village is alive and kicking. Crime is order.’

‘Crime is order?’ Moses laughed. ‘I like that.’

The old man lifted one stained finger. ‘Except when it becomes part of an escape-attempt, of course. You see, the establishment of order here in New Egypt presupposes one simple fact: the continuing existence of the village itself. Let one person leave and in no time at all you’d have everybody leaving. Hey presto, no New Egypt. It would become a gap on the map, a ghost village, a sociological monument. A community of twenty-nine policemen with no one to protect and nothing to enforce. That’s why they do everything in their power to keep us here. You remember I told you that we grow up with our own nursery rhymes? Well, I’m going to give you an example of what I mean. This is one of the most well known. If you were to walk past the village school during lessons, chances are you’d hear it floating out of one of the classrooms. Every child in the village knows the words. Your mother,’ and he turned solemn eyes on Moses, ‘used to sing it all the time.’

He pulled himself up in bed, cleared his throat and began to sing. The tune reminded Moses of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. Equally mournful, equally forlorn. The song would normally be sung by the high clear voices of children. The old man’s voice, ravaged and gravelly, gave it new bitterness, added poignancy.

The world is a dream ,

It will always be so .

Our life is a stream

With nowhere to go .

The sky’s always crying ,

The willow tree weeps .

We’re living, we’re dying ,

We’re here for keeps .

The wind comes to stay ,

The rain and the snow ;

They’re here for a day

Or a week, then they go.

But we’re here for life ,

From our very first breath ;

Come trouble, come strife ,

We’re here until death.

The world is a dream

That we never had .

Our life is a stream

Of tears so sad.

We do nothing but dream ,