Listening in the Dusk (18 page)
Read Listening in the Dusk Online
Authors: Celia Fremlin
And then, a few days later:
*
Got gun. Will shoot.
But by now it was not just for an injured bat.
I can’t bear the fact that I’m a human being. I can’t bear being a member of this monstrous species. A few nights ago we had some people in, and after dinner an argument arose about starlings: should they or shouldn’t they be allowed to come and feed at the bird-table? “Starlings are vermin,” someone said. “Of course you shouldn’t feed them.” “No they aren’t,” someone else argued. “Birds can’t be vermin” — and so the argument went on: were they or weren’t they vermin?
So later, when they’d gone, I looked up “vermin” in the dictionary.
Animals of a noxious or objectionable nature … who prey on, or are parasitic on, other species … wholesale destroyers of crops and other vegetation. Old French
vermine
,
Latin
vermis
a worm.
How perfect, how apt a description of the human race! Vermin! If you looked down from a high enough satellite, you would see them pullulating on every land-mass like maggots on a piece of meat, swarming like locusts through the forests and the grasslands, leaving dust-bowls and deserts in their wake, consuming and destroying and laying waste the food supplies of every other creature.
I’ve been collecting cuttings about the human vermin and their achievements, which I intend to paste in here some time, but in case I don’t get around to it, let me summarise a few of them:
1) In a laboratory in the States they have succeeded in grafting a second head on to a dog. The two-headed
creature lived for several days, and they have every hope that the next one will live even longer, though of course more money will be needed for the successful expansion of this line of research.
2) Somewhere in Japan they have a monkey’s brain, still alive, as proved by the encephalographic apparatus monitoring it. What the apparatus doesn’t monitor,
because
it can’t, is what the brain is experiencing while it waits in vain to die.
3) A science correspondent in one of the Qualities writes: The good folk who bewail the disappearance of wildlife have their heads — to put it kindly — in Cloud Cuckoo Land. The truth is that we live on a shrinking planet, with a human population of five billion — a figure likely to be doubled within less than forty years; there simply isn’t room for creatures other than those needed for human food. By the end of the century, or soon after, all large mammals will have to go; and the smaller ones will follow, as well as most species of birds. To put it in practical terms: we just can’t afford them; and anyone who thinks we can should be dragged forcibly out of his ivory tower and made to look squarely at the actual facts …
4) Another quote: Fish-farms are no longer a novelty or a way-out experiment; they are fast becoming a
necessity
. Already large areas of the North Sea are so polluted that many of the fish are developing cancer. As the oceans of the world become more and more polluted and less and less able to support life, these farms will become a vital source of essential food …
5) Meanwhile, while the oceans
do
still support quite a lot of fish, we have invented a wonderful new way of depleting them … Huge vacuum fishing-domes, the size of St Paul’s, sweeping over the water like a giant Hoover, sucking out of it every living thing, some to be brought ashore and sold, most to be discarded as useless, and left to die. In this new technology for destroying marine life, we in Britain are falling behind, it seems. More money is needed if we are to catch up with our rivals in Europe and
elsewhere who are seriously out-distancing us in the destruction of life in the oceans of the world.
Well, that’s just a few examples. I began collecting them quite a while back, for a sixth form debate on
Conservation
, but the habit grows on me. The few dozen cuttings I began with have become a few hundred. It’s become an obsession, you could say.
I have heard people express the fear that the human race will destroy itself. I am more afraid it won’t.
I have also heard people agonising about how it is that a merciful God can allow earthquakes, floods,
shipwrecks
, aeroplane crashes etc. Me, I can’t see the
problem
. A truly merciful God, looking down on the world as it is today, would surely order a cull of human beings, far more extensive than that entailed by the odd earthquake etc.
Well, I’m not God.
I
can’t order this cull of human beings, I haven’t the power. All the same, I do have the power to get rid of one of them. This very night. They will find me in the morning among the ruins of Flittermouse Hill, with a bullet through my brain. In case they don’t know why, I will tell them. It is in order to end my membership of this awful species, and to save those bits of the planet that would have been destroyed to keep me going for the next sixty years or so. Four hundred acres of the earth’s surface, they say, has to be covered with concrete to keep one Western citizen at the standard he has come to demand.
This is my last message to the world.
But it wasn’t. On Monday, July 4th, there was a failed suicide attempt to record. As well as the first murder.
Much of the record was in note form, understandably hasty and incomplete, but not hard to piece together into an
approximate
account of what had happened.
It was not quite midnight, and the turf still warm from the long, scorching day, when Julian settled himself among the gorse bushes that still stood in untidy, battered clumps alongside the
earthworks that were to become one of the new roads. The moon, a little past the first quarter, was just setting beyond the curve of the hill. Julian had planned the timing like this so that he would have some light with which to locate a suitable hide-out, followed by darkness in which to commit the deed.
Everything was ready — the loaded gun, the farewell note that was to be found in his pocket; and the thing that delayed him was something quite unexpected. It was that he couldn’t get
comfortable
. Either he leaned against the gorse, and had to endure the prickles, or else he had to sit straight, unsupported and ramrod stiff.
Fancy wanting to be
comfortable
when you are just about to die. I wonder if other suicides have felt this? It’s something the same as taking your last look at things; you want your last sight of the world to be of something grand and lovely, and in the same way you want your body’s last sensations to be of comfort and peace. So anyway, I fidgeted about, changing my position — this way, that way — till at last I got it right. Then I looked up.
Cassiopeia. Perseus. The Great Bear. In five minutes they just wouldn’t be there. Nothing would. At this thought I experienced such a moment of panic as I don’t know how to describe. I had to wait for it to pass.
The gun felt heavier than I’d remembered, and terribly cold. They say you should put it in your mouth, but I didn’t have the courage. I don’t know why it should need more courage, but it does, so instead I pointed it to the side of my head, and sat there nerving myself … nerving myself. Other people have done it … I
can
do it … just one tiny tug on the trigger …
“What the
hell
are you up to …?”
The voice … the dark circle of the head sliced into the stars, and straight away I pulled the trigger.
He died instantly. It seemed the purest chance that it was him and not me. If he hadn’t chanced to be walking on the grass instead of along the lorry track … If
I
hadn’t chanced to be behind this particular clump of gorse rather
than another … If I hadn’t chanced to take so long arranging myself in a comfortable position … Such trivial and arbitrary differences of time and place, and then it would have been me, not him. So little difference — one man or the other. All random chance …
I remember slipping away through the dark bushes, not feeling anything in particular. Only gradually it came to me what I’d done. I’m a murderer now, I thought. It was the strangest thing, though, I felt no guilt, nor even any fear of being caught, which of course looked like being a near certainty; my footprints must have been everywhere, and I hadn’t the ghost of an alibi. No, what I felt was an extraordinary exhilaration, such as I’ve never known before: a sense of enormous worth, of achievement. “I’ve killed a man, I’ve killed a man!” I found I was saying to myself as I walked down the street next day, as I queued for stamps at the Post Office. I’ve killed a man:
you
haven’t, you poor drip; and nor have you … nor you.
I
have — I’ve killed a man; and I felt about ten feet tall.
Another thing: it seems to have wiped out completely the shame of being a failed suicide. It has given me such strength;
next
time I shall not dither and hesitate and fail, because now I am a person who
can
inflict death. I wasn’t before, but now I am.
July
5th.
The hunt is on: TV, newspapers, the lot, but somehow I don’t feel it’s anything much to do with me.
I’m an outlaw, I’ve put myself outside the law, and so its workings don’t really concern me. I have crossed a frontier, and there is no going back. I find myself in a place of amazing freedom. I can do
anything.
Sunday
July
10th.
Blazing hot day. Lying in the gorse, only slightly shaded from the sun, and watching the human vermin pullulating below. They are all over the building sites, screeching, picnicking, dropping trails of litter. When I half-close my eyes, and see through my eyelashes, they look like one of those hospital films of abdominal
operations
— a huge, shuddering mass of flesh, mindlessly pulsating and executing bizarre and monotonous convolutions.
If I took a pot-shot into the middle of the mass, what would be the difference?
Ah, but I need my bullet for myself.
Or is it that I don’t dare?
I wish I had more courage. Or more bullets. Or something. It’s a cop-out, just shooting myself only, I ought to take a few others with me out of this over-populated world.
And that very night, he did. And the following night too. Though the entries at this point were only barely legible, they left no doubt as to the fearful facts.
Tuesday
July
12th.
THE MONSTER STRIKES AGAIN
. This is today’s headline. Well, of course it is. But I ask myself, what are the criteria of monsterhood? In almost any other period throughout the history of mankind, what I’ve done would pass as perfectly normal. The young human male who aspired to any sort of important status in his tribe would have killed quite a few men by the time he was my age, certainly more than I have. The reason I’m a monster is not that I’ve killed three men, but that I’ve killed them now, in the twentieth century.
Who will be the next victim, everyone is asking, and so am I. How do I know until I see him? I knew this last time because he looked so miserable, this one, as he stumped along, glaring at the ground, his face all twisted up with years and years of grievance and bad temper. I’d noticed him earlier, in the afternoon, jabbing with his thumb at a folded paper and snarling something about the front elevation. Having destroyed Flittermouse Hill and every creature in it, they aren’t even going to be happy with their victory. They are planning already to be miserable and discontented.
I sat near his body for a long time, waiting for it to be found, and as the beginnings of dawn shimmered over his dead face, I saw with my own eyes the vastness of the peace I had created, the sudden gentleness. The grievances, the anxiety, the ill-temper, all were gone, and as the sun rose
he lay with his blood soaking into the short grass, a sacrifice to the Powers of Earth, which of course are the worms and the soil-bacteria on whom the rest of life depends, and to whom these trickles of blood are a rare and wondrous feast. This is the first good, creative thing that this fat and pallid body has ever done: sacrificed at sunrise as so many of our ancestors — his and mine — must have been sacrificed likewise, on this very hill.
There followed a quotation from some author. Alice promised to try and track him — or her — down:
“Killing is an act of creation … Why is it a crime to kill? It is, on the contrary, a law of nature … Killing is a law thrust by nature into the very profoundest impulse of our being …”
The diarist adds a rider:
I don’t know if this author
had
actually killed anyone, but he’s certainly got it right. It’s nothing to do with any Lust to Kill’: it’s the exercise of an ancient and deeply-implanted skill; one that has lain dormant all one’s life, but is suddenly in perfect working order the moment occasion for its use arises. I would imagine that this is how a woman must feel having her first baby. The hitherto unused muscles of her womb suddenly springing into powerful and totally efficient action, with no practice, no previous training.
That’s the way it feels. It’s
easy.
That’s the amazing thing.
But a few days later, a different note was struck:
July
17th.
I feel shaken this morning, in fact a bit shattered, for last night it all went wrong. I fired from too far away, I think, and instead of being killed at once, he was injured. I hadn’t meant that at all. I ran up to him. “I’m sorry … I’m sorry!” I told him, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I only meant to kill you!” I tried to help him, for lying there he looked like any other living creature in distress. But I couldn’t do anything. I just got myself covered in blood, and so I ran
away and phoned a hospital. Anonymously, of course, I don’t want to put myself into their hands, just like that. Not yet, anyway.
It’s amazing, really, that they haven’t caught me by now, and I can’t help feeling that my indifference to whether I get caught or not must have something to do with it. For a murderer, my behaviour must be very untypical, and this may be putting them off their stroke.
One or two more, and then it’ll be my turn. I’m glad I decided on that second gun when I had the chance; now, if something goes wrong, I’ll still be able to finish myself off. I have the courage for it now, I know I have. In fact, it will hardly need courage, for I have become familiar with death, he has become an old friend.
Just before they come for me, I will do it. The rush of adrenalin will help me, as I see them closing in.