Life: An Exploded Diagram (23 page)

B
USINESS WAS SLACK
,
so Albert Scott had got himself comfortable in his barber’s chair with a cup of tea and the
Daily Sketch.
When his door pinged, he sighed and folded the paper; getting to his feet, he was most surprised to discover that his customers were Enoch and Amos Hoseason.

Enoch took the chair first, filling it with his bulk. Albert bibbed him and cranked the chair up a little. Amos sat stiffly against the back wall, flaring his nostrils slightly at the Babylonian aromas of Brylcreem and cheap cologne.

Albert, without pleasure, regarded his client’s hair, which was long and thick and none too clean. It gave off a whiff of old fireplaces and something rodenty.

“So, how would you like it, Enoch?”

“Off.”

“Pardon?”

Hoseason took a last look at himself in the mirror, then closed his eyes.

“All off. Hair and beard. Clean shaved all over. Make me like unto a newborn babe.”

Albert laughed uncertainly. “You want me to shave yer
head,
Enoch?”

“Thas what I said.”

“Well, I . . . Bleddy wars, Enoch. Newborn babies hev
some
hair. Most of ’em.”

Hoseason said nothing further. In the mirror he looked peaceful, like the severed head of John the Baptist resting on a napkin. Albert turned and looked at Amos.

“And will you be wantun the same?”

“I will, indeed.”

Albert puffed out his cheeks and rubbed his bald spot. Then he went through the shop and locked the front door. He turned the
OPEN
sign the other way around. When he returned, Amos asked him a question with his eyes.

“This’ll take some time,” Albert said. “Ent no point other customers sittun here waitun.”

This was not his reason. What he’d been asked to do was not barbering; it was barbarism. Albert didn’t want anyone coming in and catching him at it.

When he’d scissored Hoseason’s head to a stubbled knob and covered it with a hot towel, and while he was stropping the cutthroat razor, Albert said, “So, Enoch, what d’yer make of this here Cuba business, then?”

Hoseason possessed neither radio nor television, considering both to be mouthpieces of Satan. And many months had passed since he’d read anything other than the Holy Scriptures.

Without opening his eyes, he said, “What Cuba business?”

Janice Pitcher was minding the newsagent’s shop while Arnold, her father, took his afternoon nap. Like him, she was myopic and wore thick circular spectacles that gave her the appearance of a startled carp. So when the two dark-suited strangers came in, she thought at first that they were both wearing tight-fitting white bathing caps. It occurred to her (she was partial to crime novels) that armed robbers might adopt such a disguise. Her hand moved slightly nearer the button of the electric bell that would summon her father from upstairs. Only when the two men approached the counter did she realize that they were utterly shiningly bald.

Enoch Hoseason surveyed the array of newspapers and magazines. Under his hot gaze, the lewd covers of
Tit-Bits
and
Reveille
might have smoldered and flamed. He selected a newspaper at random and held it up. The jittery mix of maps, photographs, type, and headlines confused him. He opened the paper and beheld a photograph of a towering, apocalyptic explosion capped with a halo of cloud. (It was, in fact, a picture of a British nuclear test, a bomb exploded on Christmas Island, in the Pacific.) As he gazed at it, understanding rumbled through him like divine indigestion. He turned to Amos, his eyes moist.

“The prophecy, brother! Remember? ‘The seed of the fire is already in the hands of men. It shall become a mighty tree that groweth up to heaven.’”

He jabbed the photograph with his forefinger.

“‘And all shall be consumed in the leaves and branches of its burning.’ It is upon us, Amos. It comes!”

“Amen!”

Enoch seized up another couple of newspapers and shook them in his fist, his eyes glazed by inspiration.

“What price now, ye sneerers and jeerers?” he crowed. “What price your proud vanities?”

“That come to a shillun and five pence all tergether,” Janice said cautiously.

A
T 11 LOVELACE
Road that evening, George sat with a forkful of fatty pork halfway to his mouth. The chap on the telly was using a pointer to indicate a series of circles on a map with Cuba at its center. Little things like pointy footprints represented Russian ships. Some of them were very close to the part of the circle that seemed to matter most.

“Ruddy hell,” George said.

“Eat that up before that get cold, George,” Ruth said. “That was the best chop in Dewhurst’s.”

Soviet missiles being trundled through Red Square. Khrushchev watching from a balcony, flanked by slab-faced men in gangster hats. A clip of a nuclear explosion unfurling its monstrous corona.

“George?”

“For Christ’s sake, Ruth. Aren’t you listening to this?”

“No, I ent. Thas all a load of old squit. Wha’s Cuba got to do with us? Up till now, I dint have any idea where it even was. And don’t tell me you did, neither.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” George said fiercely. “Some of us takes a bloody interest.”

A man had appeared on the screen who looked a bit like a policeman. He spoke calmly as he held up a booklet with an illustration of a smiling family on the cover.

“This little publication will show you how to defend your home and your loved ones against nuclear attack. It’s not as difficult as you might think. Most of the materials you will need are easily available. At the present time there is no need to be alarmed. But we ask you to read this book, which you can get free from your local post office or library.”

The camera angle shifted. The sort-of policeman turned his head and put on a sort-of smile.

“This country of ours has come under attack before. But our courage, our resolve, and our absolute commitment to freedom have sustained us and will do so again.”

Another voice said, “That was a public service announcement on behalf of . . .”

George swallowed his pork and turned to his son.

“What you think of that, then, Clem?” He grinned sickly. “You reckon we ought to build a shelter, or what?”

Clem had left his chop untouched, a small gesture of protest at having to share a table with the wrecker of his love nest. Since Saturday, he had observed a vow of angry silence toward his father, but now he gave voice to his bitterness.

“Makes no difference either way.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

As though speaking to a wearisome pupil, Clem said, “If there
is
a nuclear war, that’s it. We’re all dead, one way or the other.”

“Not necessarily,” George said, pointing at the telly with his fork. “Not if we take precautions.”

Ruth said, “Me and Mum spent night after night under the stairs, during the war. Oh, that was horrible, wunt it, Mum?”

Win said nothing, concentrating on her piece of fish. Along with the rest of the Brethren, she had renounced meat for the advent of the Apocalypse. Win disliked fish, but it gave her the opportunity to rail at the fishmonger, against whom she held an ancient grudge. (“You’ll answer to your Maker for the price of that haddock, James Wisby, and sooner than you think.”)

“There’d be no
point
in surviving,” Clem said. “Okay, so you live in your shelter for a fortnight —”

Ruth said, “George, whatever would we do for a toilet?”

George ignored her. “Aye?”

“And then,” Clem said, “you come out. And there’s nothing left. No houses, no trees, nothing. It’d be a desert of radioactive dust.”

“You know that for a fact, do you?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Oooh.
Actually,
” George mimicked. “Well, thank you, Einstein. I’ll get on the phone and tell the government that. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it. Probably revise their plans accordingly.”

Clem pushed his chair back and stood up.

Ruth looked up from her plate. “Where’re you gorn to, Clem?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Just out.”

“You won’t be wantun that chop, then?”

From the hallway Clem said, “No. You can eat the bloody thing.”

“Hoy!” George yelled as the back door slammed.

Later, after the rice pudding, when George and Ruth were watching some rubbish or other, Win went quietly upstairs and closed her door. She clicked on her bedside light, got stiffly down onto her knees, and groped under the bed for her Robe of Deliverance. She’d cut it out of her bottom bedsheet. It shouldn’t have mattered, but she was unhappy with its roughly cut hem. It didn’t seem right to her that she would go Home looking all raggedy. She straightened up and got her sewing things out of the cupboard drawer. She perched her old bum on the side of the bed and started to stitch, humming the words of the twenty-third psalm.

“O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
”

C
LEM AND GOZ
mimed the words from the sixth-form pews in the organ loft. At the close of the hymn, while the boys shuffled and clonked onto their seats, Stinker Bloxham stood at the lectern wearing his fur-trimmed bat robe and an ironically patient expression. When something close to silence had been achieved, he turned to the man who sat onstage among the school staff.

“Over to you, Mr. Wagstaff.”

Wagstaff was a trim little man in a dark-blue uniform with an armband embroidered with the words
CIVIL DEFENSE.

“Thank you, Headmaster, and good morning, young gentlemen. Yesterday, as I’m sure you’ll remember, I spoke to you about the ways you can help your parents prepare their homes against the possibility of nuclear attack.”

Clem grinned, noting Tash Harmsworth’s scowl. Tash was a bugger for an incorrect preposition.

“The very
unlikely
possibility of nuclear attack. However, preparedness is everything, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Wagstaff waited for a response, but none came. So he soldiered on.

“Today I’m going to tell you what to do if you
are
caught in the open when the four-minute warning sounds. Let me remind you what the four-minute warning will — might — sound like.”

Wagstaff closed his eyes and emitted a doglike wail. As it rose in pitch, he slowly lifted his arms. As it faded, he lowered them. As it rose again, he lifted them. Some of the younger boys tittered and sniggered. Stinker got to his feet and glared. From their stations at the ends of the pews, the Gestapo, like hunting dogs, aimed their fierce gazes at offenders.

“It’s not funny,” Wagstaff said, opening his eyes. “It really isn’t. Anyway. When you hear that, gentlemen, you must take cover in any available building and adopt the blast position that I demonstrated yesterday. It is exceedingly unlikely that you will be unable to reach a protective building. After all, these days an Englishman can run a mile in less than four minutes.”

Again, he waited vainly for appreciation.

“However, if you are caught in the open some considerable distance from cover, here is what you must do. First, look for a depression in the ground. A trench or ditch, for example. Lie in it with your face to the ground. And make sure that exposed parts of your body, such as your head and hands, are protected. If you happen to be carrying a newspaper or something similar, place it over your head. If you are not, use your clothing to cover yourself completely. I shall demonstrate.”

Wagstaff unbuttoned his tunic and prostrated himself on the stage. He pulled the back of his tunic up over his head, then tucked his hands between his thighs.

“Like so,” he said, muffled.

A man lying on the stage of Newgate’s school hall with his head covered by his jacket, his braces showing, and his hands on his nadgers. The silence that ensued was like the insuck of the sea before a tidal wave, or the ponderous gap between lightning and thunder.

Clem nudged Goz, then looked at him, expecting his face to be taut with suppressed laughter. It wasn’t. It was pale with rage. Grim.

“Goz?” (Whispered.)

Nothing.

Wagstaff got to his feet and adjusted his clothing.

“Now,” he said, “a word about fallout. Fallout is the radioactive material that falls from the sky after a nuclear explosion. It might fall in the form of rain or, more likely, ash or dust. If you do find yourselves in an exposed space, and you are in a fallout area, you should remain in the covered position, which I have just demonstrated, for two hours, which is the maximum time in which fallout will occur. After that time, you should seek shelter within the nearest building. However, before you do so, you must remove the fallout from your clothes, thus.”

He removed the tunic and shook it vigorously with his face averted. Then he used the tunic to slap at his trousers, fore and aft. Finally he flapped a handkerchief at his shoes.

“Fallout is a form of contamination, and it is vital that you free yourself of it before you rejoin your families or other groups. I cannot stress enough the importance of this, gentlemen.”

He regarded his audience somberly. Then he smiled.

“So pick yourselves up, dust yourselves off, and start all over again, as the song has it. Thank you for your attention.”

He returned to his seat.

There came a light scattering of uncertain applause from the Worms and Maggots in the front pews, which the Gestapo quickly suppressed.

Goz walked slightly ahead of Clem toward the sixth-form common room. He went past the doors, saying over his shoulder, “Fag. Bogs.”

The Newgate lavatories had been built a hundred years earlier, less as a convenience than a warning, their squalor and discomfort a stern reminder of the vileness of human bodily functions and their attendant temptations. The building was roofless, the urinal a black-painted wall with a low gutter at its foot. The cubicles lacked doors, doors being an encouragement of the Solitary Vice. Now and again Hake, the school caretaker, sluiced the place out with a bucket of diluted Jeyes Fluid, which added an acrid sweetness to the bogs’ ancient aroma.

Goz went to the far corner and leaned against the stained trough that served as a washbasin. He took a packet of ten Anchor from his inside pocket and lit one up. Clem waited silently. After three drags, Goz passed him the ciggie and let forth a stream of elaborate obscenities.

Clem laughed smoke.

“What’re you laughing at, Ackroyd? You think it’s funny, sitting there and being idiotized?”

“Is that a word?”

“Yeah. I just used it. Give us that fag back.”

Goz emitted a mean stream of smoke and said, “One: nuclear missiles do not explode when they hit the ground. They explode
above
it. So lying in a ditch with a bloody newspaper over your head is . . . is about as stupid as you can get. Two: fallout is effing radioactive. What did that moron mean,
brush it off?
Like it was
dandruff,
or somethun? Lie in a ditch with that shit dropping on you for two hours, then just tidy up and go home?”

“Goz, I know all that. Why’re you —?”

“Three: RAF Beckford is five miles away. It’s a base for V-bombers, if I remember correctly. Planes that’re got nuclear bombs on them. Plus, there are two Yank air force bases within fifty miles of here. They’re got nuclear bombers there as well. And what that means, comrade, is that we are slap in the middle of a Russian target. If Kennedy presses the button, Khrushchev’ll press his bloody button, and we get wiped out five minutes later. And to have to sit there listening to that gormless, lying little twot . . .”

“Goz, Goz. Orright. But look, it’s not really gonna happen, is it? It’s too . . .”

“You not been watching the box? Reading the papers?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

Goz opened the tap behind him and drowned the cigarette end and flicked it backward over the wall into the butcher’s yard that bordered the school.

“Listen,” Goz said, “and no offense, comrade, but I know for a fact that the be-all and end-all of existence for you is getting your end away with the lovely doe-eyed Miss Mortimer. Fair enough. But I’ve got
plans,
comrade. I’ve got ideas about what I want to do with my life. And it dunt include getting fried alive because some pillock wants missiles on Cuba and some other pillock don’t. And you know what? It
seriously
cheeses me off when some bloke called Wankstaff stands there and tells me that all I have to do is lie down and pull my jacket over my head and then carry on as normal. ’Cos we are
gone,
comrade, when the Bomb goes off.
Gone.
”

Tash Harmsworth appeared around the far end of the urinals and said, “Ah. My Fool and my Bastard. I was wondering where you were.”

(Harmsworth was not being gratuitously offensive. Goz was reading the part of Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester.)

“Sir,” Goz said, straightening up but keeping his eyes on the stained concrete floor.

Tash pushed his vampire robe aside and took a metal cigarette case out of his pocket. He lit an untipped Capstan with a gold Dunhill lighter.

“The rest of the cast is disturbed by your absence. Cordelia is particularly distressed; it’s her big scene this morning.”

“Sorry, sir,” Clem said.

“I’m sure you are. I assume you had something of significance to discuss?”

“Only the end of the world, sir,” Goz said.

“Ah,” Tash said. “
That.
And here was I thinking you’d merely sloped off for a smoke. May I inquire as to what conclusions you have come to, regarding the Apocalypse? Ackroyd?”

“We’re against it, sir.”

“Are you, indeed? I shall write notes to President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev immediately. I’m sure that when they learn that two scholars as eminent as yourselves disapprove of their actions, they will come promptly to their senses.”

Tash took a deep pull on his Capstan, studying the bitterness on Goz’s unresponsive face.

“Nothing to say, Gosling?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well.” Tash tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the urinal. “Shall we go, then? Because ‘at my back I hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.’ Who wrote that, Ackroyd?”

“Don’t know, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Andrew Marvell,” Goz muttered as if he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it.

“Correct, Gosling. Give that man a cigar. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ You’ve not read it, Ackroyd?”

“No, sir.”

“You should. A rare example of a poem with a practical purpose. Even you, Ackroyd, might find it handy one of these days.”

The boys followed him out of the bogs.

“Essentially,” Tash said as if resuming an interrupted lecture, “each of us is a single consciousness. Therefore, when we die, all else dies. The light goes out, and all is darkness. Some find that concept bleak. I find it comforting.”

Goz said, “What about envying the people that go on living, sir?”

“I bloody well don’t,” Tash said.