The Wanting Seed (14 page)

‘Oh, come on now, do you see,’ said the captain impatiently. ‘You said she was to have a child. We can check easily enough, of course, do you see, that she’s pregnant. What I want to know is, when is she to have the child? When did she, by your calculation. conceive?’

‘No idea.’ Tristram shook his head in gloom and apathy. ‘No idea at all:

The captain took from one of his tunic pockets something in rustling yellow paper. ‘Perhaps you’re hungry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a little synthechoc would help.’ He unwrapped the bar and held it out. The Blessed Ambrose Bayley was quicker than Tristram; he darted like a ray and snatched the bar, drooling. Tristram was on to him, and the two snarled, clawed, tore. Finally each got about half. Three seconds were enough to wolf the brown sticky stuff down. ‘Come on now,’ said the captain sharply. ‘When was it?’

‘En oz ot?’ Tristram was licking round his palate and sucking his fingers. ‘Oh, that,’ he said at last. ‘It must have been in May. I know when it was. It was at the
beginning of the Interphase. Have you any more of that stuff?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the captain patiently. ‘What is the Interphase?’

‘Of course,’ said Tristram, ‘you’re not a historian, are you? Of the science of historiography you know nothing. You’re just a hired thug with pockets crammed tight with synthechoc.’ He belched and then looked sick. ‘When all you hired thugs began to swagger through the streets. Give me more of that, blast you.’ He then turned savagely on his cell-mate. ‘That was mine and you ate it. It was meant for me, blast you.’ He weakly belaboured the Blessed Ambrose Bayley who, hands joined and eyes swooning upwards, said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Tristram gave up, panting.

‘Good,’ said the captain. ‘Well, then, we know when to take action. You can look forward, do you see, to the final disgracing of your brother and the punishment of your wife.’

‘What do you mean? What are you talking about? Punishment? What punishment? If it’s my wife you’re going to go for, you leave that bitch alone, do you hear? She’s my wife, not yours. I’ll deal with my wife in my own way.’ He sank without shame into snivelling. ‘Oh, Beattie, Beattie,’ he whined, ‘why don’t you get me out of here?’

‘You realize, of course,’ said the captain, ‘that you’re in here because of your brother?’

‘Less talk from. you,’ sneered Tristram, ‘and more synthechoc, you gutsy hypocrite. Come on, hand over:’

‘Sustenance, for the love of heaven,’ fluted the Blessed
Ambrose Bayley. ‘Do not forget the servitors of the Lord in the days of your fatness.’ He fell on to his knees and clung to the captain’s shins, nearly bringing him over.

‘Warder !’ called the captain.

‘And,’ said Tristram, ‘you leave my child alone. It’s my child, you infanticidal maniac.’ He started. with feeble fists, to hammer on the captain like a door. ‘My child, you swine. My protest, my dirty word to the dirty world, you robber.’ He began to frisk the captain for synthechoc with the quick long hands of a monkey. ‘Warder!’ called the captain, fighting him off. The Blessed Ambrose Bayley relaxed his hold and crawled, dispirited, back to his bench-bunk. ‘Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys,’ he said perfunctorily, ‘today and tomorrow in honour of the Little Flower. Go in peace and God bless you.’

The warder came, saying cheerfully, ‘Not given you any trouble, have they, sir? That’s right: Tristram’s arms, too weak for further frisking, had dropped to his sides. ‘Him,’ pointed the warder. ‘A proper little terror he was, when he first came here. Couldn’t get no sense out of him, one of the real criminal class. Much tamer now, he is,’ he said, with a touch of pride. Tristram slumped in his corner, muttering, ‘My child, my child, my child.’ With those spondees in his ears, the captain, grinning nervously, left.

Five

L
ATE
December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle – aged man named Thomas Wharton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him – all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back – that the King’s Peace might not be broken – by munching and dripping greyboys. In Thirsk, North Riding, three lads – Alfred Pickles, David Ogden and Jackie Priestley – were struck dead with a hammer in a dark ginnel and dragged into a terraced house by way of the backyard. The street was gay for two nights with the smoke of barbecues. In Stoke-on-Trent the carcase of a woman (later identified as Maria Bennett, spinster, aged twenty-eight) grinned up suddenly – several good clean cuttings off her – from under a bank of snow. In Gillingham, Kent, Greater London, a shady back-street eating-shop opened, grilling nightly, and members of both police forces seemed to patronize it. In certain unregenerate places on the Suffolk coast there were rumours of big crackling Christmas dinners.

In Glasgow, on Hogmanay, a bearded sect professing worship of Njal offered a multiple human sacrifice. reserving the entrails for the deified burnt advocate, the flesh for themselves. Kirkcaldy, less subtle, saw a number of private ceilidhs with meat sandwiches. The New Year commenced with stories of timid anthropophagy from
Maryport, Runcorn, Burslem, West Bromwich and Kidderminster. Then the metropolis flashed its own sudden canines: a man called Amis suffered savage amputation of an arm off Kingsway; S. R. Coke, journalist, was boiled in an old copper near Shepherd’s Bush; Miss Joan Waine, a teacher, was fried in segments.

Those were the stories, anyway. There was no real way of checking the truth of them; they might well have been the delirious fantasies of extreme hunger. One story in particular was so incredible that it cast doubt on the others. It was reported from Brodick on the Isle of Arran that a vast communal nocturnal gorge of manflesh had been followed by a heterosexual orgy in the ruddy light of the fat-spitting fires and that, the morning after, the root known as salsify was seen sprouting from the pressed earth. That could not, by any manner of means or stretch of the organ of credulity, possibly be believed.

Six

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA’S
pains were starting.

‘Poor old girl,’ said Shonny. ‘Poor, poor old lady.’ He and his wife and sister-in-law were standing, this bright snappy forenoon in February, by the sty of Bessie, the ailing sow. Bessie, all the slack grey deadweight of her, lay snorting feebly, a great ruin of flesh, on her side. Her uppermost flank, curiously mottled, heaved as in a dream of hunting. Shonny’s Panceltic eyes filled with
tears. ‘Worms a yard long,’ he grieved, ‘horrible live worms. Why should a worm have life and she none? Poor, poor, poor old lady.’

‘Oh, stop it, Shonny,’ Mavis sniffed. ‘We’ve got to make ourselves hard-hearted. She’s only a pig, after all.’

‘Only a pig?
Only
a pig?’ Shonny was indignant. ‘She’s grown up with the children, God bless the old girl. She’s been a member of the family. She’s given her piglings unstintingly that we might be decently fed. She shall, the Lord keep her soul, be given a Christian burial.’

Beatrice-Joanna could sympathize with his tears; she was, in many ways, closer to Shonny than Mavis was. But she had other things on her mind now. The pains had started. A fair balance today: death of a pig, birth of a man. She was not afraid, she had confidence in Shonny and Mavis, especially Shonny; her pregnancy had run a healthy conventional course, subject only to certain frustrations: a strong desire for pickled gherkins had had to go unsatisfied, an urge to rearrange the furniture of the farmhouse had been stamped on by Mavis. Sometimes in the night an overwhelming longing for the comforting arms not, strangely, of Derek but of–

Aaaargh.

‘That makes two in twenty minutes,’ said Mavis. ‘You’d better come inside.’

‘It’s the contractions,’ said Shonny with something like glee. ‘It’ll be some time tonight, praise the Lord.’

‘A bit of a twinge,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘Not much. Just a bit, that’s all.’

‘Right,’ bubbled Shonny eagerly. ‘The first thing you’ve got to have is an enema. Soap and water. You’ll
see to that, will you, Mavis? And she’d better have a good warm bath. Right. Thank the Lord we’ve plenty of hot water.’ He rushed them into the house, leaving Bessie to suffer in loneliness, and started opening and slamming drawers. ‘The ligatures,’ he cried. ‘I’ve got to make the ligatures.’

‘There’s plenty of time,’ said Mavis. ‘She’s a human being, you know, not a beast of the field.’

‘That’s why I’ve got to make the ligatures,’ blustered Shonny. ‘Good God, woman, do you want her just to bite it off, like a she-cat?’ He found linen thread and, singing a hymn in Panceltic, twisted ten-inch lengths for tying the umbilical cord, knotting them at the ends. Meanwhile Beatrice-Joanna was taken upstairs to the bathroom, and the hot-water pipes of the house sang full-throatedly, creaking and straining like a ship under way.

The pains grew more frequent. Shonny prepared the bed in the heated outhouse, spreading brown paper across its middle and smoothing a drawsheet over, singing all the time. The crops had failed and a faithful sow was dying, but a new life was preparing to thumb its nose – in the gesture once known as ‘fat bacon’ – at the forces of sterility. Suddenly, unbidden, two strange names – bearded names they seemed somehow – came into Shonny’s head: Zondek and Aschheim. Who were they now? He remembered: they were the ancient devisers of a pregnancy test. A few drops of pregnant woman’s urine would send a baby mouse speeding to sexual maturity. He had read that, reading up the duties which he was now beginning to perform. His heart, for some reason, lifted in tremendous elation. Of course,
there
was the big secret – all life was one, all life was one. But no time to think about that now.

Dymphna and Llewelyn came home from school. ‘What’s the matter, Dad? What’s going on, Dad? What are you doing, Dad?’

‘Your aunt’s time is come. Don’t bother me now. Go and play somewhere. No, wait, go and stay with poor old Bessie. Hold her trotter, poor old girl.’

Beatrice-Joanna now wanted to lie down. The amnion had ruptured in a rush, the amniotic waters had escaped. ‘On your left side, girl,’ ordered Shonny. ‘Is it hurting? Poor old lady.’ The pains were, in fact, growing much worse; Beatrice-Joanna began to hold her breath and to bear down strenuously. Shonny knotted a long towel to the bed-head, urging, ‘Pull on that, girl. Pull hard. God bless you, it won’t be long now.’ Beatrice-Joanna pulled, groaning. ‘Mavis,’ said Shonny, ‘this is going to be a longish job. Fetch me in a couple of bottles of plum wine and a glass.’

‘There are only a couple of bottles left.’

‘Fetch them in just the same like a good girl. There, there, my beauty,’ he said to Beatrice-Joanna. ‘You pull away there, bless you.’ He checked that the old-fashioned swaddling clothes – knitted by the two sisters in the long winter evenings – were warming on the radiator. He had sterilized his ligatures; a pair of scissors was boiling in a pan; a tin bath shone on the floor; cotton wool waited to be teased into pledgets; there was a bolster-slip for a binder – all, in fact, was ready. ‘God bless you, my dear,’ he said to his wife as she reappeared with the bottles. ‘This is going to be a great day.’

It was certainly a long day. For nearly two hours
Beatrice-Joanna struggled muscularly. She cried with the pains, and Shonny, swigging his plum wine and shouting encouragement, watched and waited, sweating as much as she. ‘If only,’ he muttered, ‘we had an anaesthetic of some kind or another. Here, girl,’ he said boldly, ‘drink some of this,’ and he proffered his bottle. But Mavis dragged his hand back.

‘Look,’ she cried. ‘It’s coming !’

Beatrice-Joanna shrieked. The head was being born: it had finished its difficult journey at last, leaving behind the bony tunnel of the pelvic girdle, pushing through the sheath to the air of a world that, now indifferent, would soon be hostile. After a brief pause the child’s body pushed itself out. ‘Perfect,’ said Shonny, his eyes shining, wiping the child’s shut eyes with a moist pledget, delicate and loving in his movements. The newborn yelled to greet the world. ‘Lovely,’ said Shonny. Then, when the pulse in the umbilical cord began to stop, he took two of his ligatures and skilfully made his ties, tight, tighter, tightest, forming two frontiers with a no-man’s-land in the middle. Here, careful with his sterilized scissors, he snipped. The new bit of life, full of savagely gulped air, was now on its own. ‘A boy,’ said Mavis.

‘A boy? So it is,’ said Shonny. Free of its mother, it had ceased to be merely a thing. Shonny turned to watch for the thrust of the placenta while Mavis wrapped the child in a shawl and laid it, him, in a box by the radiator; the bath could come later. ‘Good God,’ said Shonny, watching. Beatrice-Joanna cried out, but not so loud as before. ‘Another one,’ called Shonny in awe. ‘Twins, by God. A litter, by the Lord Jesus.’

Seven

‘O
UT
, you,’ said the warder.

‘And about time,’ blustered Tristram, getting up from his bunk. ‘About bloody time, you nasty thing. Give me something to eat, blast you, before I go.’

‘Not you,’ said the warder with relish. ‘Him.’ He pointed. ‘You’ll be with us a long time yet, Mister Dirty. It’s him as has got to be released.’

The Blessed Ambrose Bayley, shaken by the warder, blinked and goggled his way out of the perpetual presence of God that had set in at the end of January. He was very weak.

‘Traitor,’ snarled Tristram. ‘Stool-pigeon. Telling lies about me, that’s what you’ve been doing. Buying your shameful freedom with lies.’ To the warder he said, hopefully, his eyes fierce and large, ‘Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake? Are you quite sure it isn’t me?’

‘Him,’ pointed the warder. ‘Not you. Him. You’re not a –’ He squinted at the paper in his hand. ‘_ Not a minister of the cloth, whatever that means, are you now? All them have to be released. But foul-mouths like you have to go on being here. Right?’

‘It’s flagrant bloody injustice,’ yelled Tristram, ‘that’s what it is.’ He fell on his knees before the warder, clasping his hands in prayer and hunching his shoulders as if he had just broken his neck. ‘Please let me out instead of him. He’s past it. He thinks he’s dead already, burnt at the stake. He thinks he’s well on the road to canonization. He just doesn’t know what’s going on.
Please.’