The Wanting Seed (5 page)

‘Bloody nonsense,’ said the man, more loudly. Then he swung his head, slowly and warily, from side to side, examining Tristram on his right and the drinker on his left with care, as if one were a sculpture of the other and the likeness had to be checked. ‘Know what I was?’
he said. Tristram wondered. A saturnine man with eyes in charcoal caves, reddish beak, sulky Stuart mouth. ‘Give me another of those,’ he said to the barman, plonking his money down. ‘
Thought
you wouldn’t be able to tell,’ he said in triumph, turning to Tristram. ‘Well,’ he said, and he downed raw alc with a smack and a sigh, ‘I was a priest. Do you know what that is?’

‘A sort of monk,’ said Tristram. ‘Something to do with religion.’ He gave this man a mouthful of awe, as though he were Pelagius himself. ‘But,’ he objected, ‘there aren’t any priests any more. There haven’t been priests for hundreds of years.’

The man held out his hands, fingers spread, as though testing himself for the shakes. ‘These,’ he said, ‘have performed the daily miracle.’ More reasonably, ‘There’ve been a few,’ he said. ‘One or two pockets of resistance in the Provinces. People who don’t hold with all this liberal muck. Pelagius,’ he said, ‘was a heretic. Man needs divine grace.’ He returned to his hands, examining them clinically, as if for some minute spot which would announce the onset of disease. ‘More of this stuff,’ he told the barman, now using his hands to search in his pockets for money. ‘Yes,’ he told Tristram. ‘There are priests still, though I’m no longer one of them. Thrown out,’ he whispered. ‘Unfrocked. Oh, God, God, God.’ He became histrionic. One or two of the homos tittered, hearing the divine name. ‘But they can never take away this power, never, never.’

‘Cecil, you old cow!’

‘Oh, my dear, just look what
she’s
wearing!’

The heteros also turned to look, but with less enthusiasm. A trio of police recruits had come in, smiling
wide. One of them performed a small step-dance, ending with a palsied salute. Another pretended to spray the room with his carbine. Remote, cold, abstract, the concrete music went on. The homos laughed, whinnied, embraced.

‘It wasn’t for that sort of thing I was unfrocked,’ said the man. ‘It was for real love, the real thing, not this blasphemous mockery.’ He nodded gloomily in the direction of the gay group of police and civilians. ‘She was very young, only seventeen. Oh, God, God. But,’ he said strongly, ‘they can’t take away this divine power.’ He again gazed at his hands, this time like Macbeth. ‘Bread and wine,’ he said, ‘into the body and blood – But there’s no wine any more. And the Pope,’ he said ‘an old, old, old man on St Helena. And me,’ he said, without false modesty, ‘a blasted clerk in the Ministry of Fuel and Power.’

One of the homo policemen had inserted a tanner in the musicator. A dance-tune plopped out suddenly, as though a bag of ripe plums had burst – a combo of abstract tape-noises with a slow gut-shaking beat deep beneath. One of the policemen began to dance with a bearded civilian. It was graceful, Tristram had to admit that, intricate and graceful. But the unfrocked priest was disgusted. ‘Bloody exhibition,’ he said, and, as one of the non-dancing homos turned up the volume of the music, he shouted loud and without warning,
‘Shut that blasted row!’

The homos gazed with mild interest, the dancers open-mouthed at him, still rocking gently in each other’s arms. ‘
You
shut it,’ said the barman. ‘We don’t want any trouble here.’

‘Unnatural lot of bastards,’ said the priest. Tristram admired the priestly language. ‘The sin of Sodom. God ought to strike the lot of you dead.’

‘You old spoilsport,’ one snorted at him. ‘Where’s your manners?’ And then the police were upon him. It was swift, balletic, laughing; not violence as Tristram had read of violence in the past; it seemed more tickling than hitting. But, in no more than a count-out of five, the unfrocked priest was leaning against the bar, trying to draw up breath from a great way down, blood all over his mouth. ‘Are you his friend?’ one of the police said to Tristram. Tristram was shocked to see that this one wore black lipstick to match his tie.

‘No,’ said Tristram. ‘I’ve never seen him before. Never seen him before in my life. I was just going anyway.’ He finished his alc-and-orange and started to leave.

‘And then the cock crew,’ grunted the unfrocked priest. ‘This is my blood,’ he said, wiping his mouth. He was too tipsy to have felt any pain.

Eleven

W
HEN
they lay panting more slowly, detumescence magically synchronically achieved, his arm under her relaxed body, she wondered if perhaps after all she hadn’t meant that to happen. She said nothing to Derek; this was her own affair. She felt rather remote, detached from Derek, as a poet may feel–after a sonnet – detached from the pen that wrote it. The foreign word
Urmutter
swam up from her unconscious, and she wondered what it meant.

He was the first to surface from the parachronic, asking, man being a chronic animal, lazily, ‘What would the time be now?’

She didn’t answer. ‘I can’t understand,’ she said instead. ‘All this hypocrisy and deceit. Why do people have to pretend they’re something they’re not? It’s all a ghastly farce.’ She spoke sharply but still as from some timeless state. ‘You love love,’ she said. ‘You love love more than any man I’ve ever known. And yet you treat it as something to be ashamed of.’

He sighed profoundly. ‘Dichotomy,’ he said, throwing the word languidly at her, like a ball stuffed with duck’s down. ‘Remember the human dichotomy.’

‘What about –’ she yawned ‘– the human whatever-it-is?’

‘The division. Contradictions. Instincts tell us one thing and reason tells us another. That could be tragic if we allowed it to be. But it’s better to see it as comic. We were right,’ he said elliptically, ‘to throw God out and install Mr Livedog in his place. God’s a tragic conception.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Never mind.’ He caught her yawn belatedly, showing snowy plastic crowns. ‘The conflicting claims of line and circle. You’re all line, that’s your trouble.’

‘I’m circular. I’m globular. Look.’

‘Physically, yes. Mentally, no. You’re still a creature of instinct, after all these years of education and slogans and subliminal film propaganda. You don’t give a damn about the state of the world, the state of the State. I do.’

‘Why should I? I’ve got my own life to live.’

‘You’d have no life at all to live if it weren’t for people like me. The State is each of its members. Supposing,’ he said seriously, ‘nobody worried about the birth-rate. Supposing we didn’t get concerned about the straight line travelling on and on and on. We’d literally starve. Dognose we’ve little enough to eat as it is. We’ve managed to achieve a sort of stasis, thanks to my department and similar government departments all over the world, but that can’t last much longer, not the way things are going.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s the old story. Liberalism prevails, and liberalism means laxness. We leave it to education and propaganda and free contraceptives, abortion clinics and condolences. We encourage non-productive forms of sexual activity. We like to kid ourselves that people are good enough and wise enough to be aware of their responsibilities. But what happens? There was the case, only a few weeks ago, of a couple in Western Province who’d had six children.
Six
. I ask you. And all alive, too. A very old-fashioned couple – God-followers. They talked about fulfilling God’s will and all that nonsense. One of our officials had a word with them, tried to make them see sense. Imagine – eight bodies in a flat smaller than this. But they wouldn’t see sense. Apparently they had a copy of the Bible – Dognose where they’d got it from. Have you ever seen one of those?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s an old religious book full of smut. The big sin is to waste your seed, and if God loves you He fills your house with kids. The language is very old-
fashioned, too. Anyway, they kept appealing to this all the time, talking about fertility and barren fig trees getting cursed and so on.’ Derek shuddered with genuine horror. ‘They were quite a young couple, too.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘What
could
happen? They were told there was a law limiting offspring to one birth only, dead or alive, but they said it was a wicked law. If God didn’t intend man to be fruitful, they said, why did He implant the instinct for increase in him? They were told that God was an outmoded concept, but they wouldn’t take that. They were told they had a duty to their neighbours, and they conceded that, but they couldn’t see how limitation of family constituted a duty. A very difficult case.’

‘And nothing happened to them?’

‘Nothing much. They were fined. They were warned against having any more kids. They were given contraceptive pills and ordered to attend the local birth-control clinic for instruction. But they seemed quite unrepentant. And there are a lot of people like that, all over the world – China, India, the East Indies. That’s what’s so frightening. That’s why there’s going to be a change. The world population figures are hair-raising. We’re several millions on the wrong side. All through trusting people. You wait, you’ll see our rations reduced in a day or so. What
is
the time?’ he asked again. It was not an urgent question; he could, if he’d wanted, have removed his arm from under her warm lax body, leaned out to the far corner of the tiny room, and picked up his wrist micro-radio, which had a watch-face in its back. But he was too lazy to move.

‘I should think it’s about five-thirty,’ said Beatrice-
Joanna. ‘You can check with the telly, if you like.’ His free arm was able, quite comfortably, to click the switch by the bedhead. A light curtain came down over the window, shutting out just enough of the day, and in a second or so synthetic music came gurgling and wailing gently from the ceiling. Unblown, unplucked, unbeaten music, like that heard distractedly by alc-drinking Tristram at that very moment. Here were oscillating valves, tap-water, ships’ sirens, thunder, marching feet, vocalizations into a throat-mike – crabbed and inverted to create a brief symphony designed to please rather than excite. The screen above their heads glowed whitely, then erupted into a coloured stereoscopic image of the statue that crowned Government Building. The stone eyes, above a baroque beard, a nose strong to break the wind, glared out defiantly; clouds moved behind as if in a hurry; the sky was the colour of school ink.

‘There he is,’ said Derek, ‘whoever he is–our patron saint. St Pelagius, St Augustine, or St Anonymous–which? We shall know tonight.’

The saint’s image faded. Then bloomed an imposing ecclesiastical interior – venerable grey nave, ogee arches. From the altar marched down two plump male figures dressed snowily like hospital housemen. ‘The Sacred Game,’ announced a voice. ‘Cheltenham Ladies against West Bromwich Males. Cheltenham Ladies have won the toss and elected to bat first.’ The plump white figures came down to inspect the wicket in the nave. Derek switched off. The stereoscopic image lost a dimension, then died.

‘It’s just after six, then,’ said Derek. ‘I’d better be going.’ He eased his numb arm from under his mistress’s
shoulder-blades, then swung himse1f off the bed.

‘There’s plenty of time,’ yawned Beatrice-Joanna.

‘Not any more.’ Derek drew on his narrow trousers. He strapped his microradio to his wrist, glancing at the watch-face. ‘Twenty past,’ he said. Then, ‘The Sacred Game, indeed. The last ritual of civilized Western Man.’ He snorted. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’d better not see each other for a week or so. Whatever you do, don’t come looking for me in the Ministry. I’ll get in touch with you somehow. Somehow,’ he said vaguely, muffied by his shirt. ‘Would you be an angel,’ he said, putting on the homosexual mask with his jacket, ‘and just peep out and see if there’s anybody on the corridor? I don’t want to be seen leaving.’

‘All right.’ Beatrice-Joanna sighed, got off the bed, put on her dressing-gown, and went to the door. She looked left and right, like a child practising kerb-drill, came back in and said, ‘Nobody there.’

‘Thank Dog for that.’ He pronounced the final plosive too sibilantly, petulantly.

‘There’s no need to put on that homo act with me, Derek.’

‘Every good actor,’ he minced, ‘starts acting in the wings.’ He gave her a butterfly kiss on the left cheek. ‘Good-bye, dearest.’

‘Good-bye.’ He undulated down the corridor towards the lift, the satyr in him put to sleep till next time, whenever that would be.

Twelve

S
TLL
somewhat shaken, despite two more glasses of alc in a drinking-cellar nearer home, Tristram entered Spurgin Building. Even here, in the large vestibule, there were laughing grey uniforms. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like it one bit. Waiting at the lift-gates were neighbours of the fortieth floor – Wace, Durtnell and Visser; Mrs Hamper and young Jack Phoenix; Miss Wallis, Miss Runting, Arthur Spragg; Phipps, Walker-Meredith, Fred Ramp, the octogenarian Mr Earthrowl. The lift-indicators flashed yellow: 47 – 46 – 45. ‘I saw a rather terrible thing,’ said Tristram to old Mr Earthrowl. ‘Eh?’ said Mr Earthrowl. 38 – 37 – 36. ‘A special emergency regulation,’ said Phipps of the Ministry of Labour. ‘They’ve all been ordered back to work.’ Young Jack Phoenix yawned; Tristram noticed, for the first time, black hairs on his cheekbones. 22 − 21 − 20 − 19. ‘Police on the docks,’ Durtnell was saying. ‘Only way to deal with the bastards. Rough stuff. Should have done it years ago.’ He looked with approval at the grey police, blacktied as if in mourning for Pelagianism, light carbines under their arms. 12 – 11 – 10. In imagination Tristram punched a homo or castro on his sweet plump face. 3 – 2 – 1 – G. And there was the face, neither sweet nor plump, of his brother Derek. Both looked astonished at each other.

‘What,’ asked Tristram, ‘in Dogsname are you doing here?’

‘Oh, Tristram,’ minced Derek, alveolizing the name
to an insincere caress. ‘So there you are.’