Travels in Nihilon (12 page)

‘It's not enough,' screamed the old man, but Benjamin picked up the bottle and walked outside.

A mechanic was polishing his new windscreen: ‘She's all ready, sir.'

‘How much?'

‘The manager's coming now, sir,' said the mechanic, running to the safety of a shed. Benjamin saw the revolver half-concealed under the clipboard that the manager carried, and, in spite of his smiling face, guessed that he would use it in claiming for the new windscreen some preposterous price that he'd not otherwise be able to get.

He sprang to his car and started the engine. A bullet whizzed through the open window, fired by the manager who crouched barefoot by the door of his office.

Benjamin grabbed his own revolver from the glove-box and fired three quick shots, sending the manager back under cover. There was a pause in the battle, while he drove to the far end of the asphalt, then stopped, but left his engine still running. When he leaned out of the other window to see what was happening, a bullet shattered his back window and buried itself among the luggage. Another shot passed close to the top of his head, and made a neat but large hole in the newly installed windscreen.

Benjamin leapt out and crouched on the ground, setting his sights at a drum of petrol resting near the pump. A deep and fearful rage clarified his aim, and he emptied his revolver, then got back speedily into the car. The garage manager and his attendants, mechanics, and clerks, as well as the old man from the coffee shop, began running for safety across the open fields.

His rear mirrors turned orange, as if the sun itself were exploding. Pumps, storage tanks, and shed after shed went showering and billowing into the air, and as he drove along the road he didn't bother to wonder whether he was on the right or the wrong side of it, for the sound of explosions still going on behind made him more drunk than could any Nihilitz.

Chapter 14

Her sight was gratified by the orderly cultivation of cornfields and terraced vineyards on either side of the road. People were working, the breeze freshened her, and the neat husbandry of the Nihilonian peasants made her feel safe and protected in the Zap sports car of the chief of police. ‘Will we really catch him?' she asked.

‘No doubt about it,' he answered, a reassuring hand on her knee, which she felt too goodnatured to push away. ‘The train won't leave for another hour, and we'll be there in fifteen minutes. We'll get the blackguard, have no fear. I'll see that you get your revenge.'

‘It's my luggage I want. I have important appointments in Nihilon City.'

‘I hope you won't mention this regrettable incident,' he said. ‘I could lose my job over it. In which case I might be given some ministerial post in the government, and that would be terrible.'

‘Wouldn't you like that?'

‘Certainly not. Ministers come and go. They get sacked or shot. But the chief of police goes on forever. If he's careful.' He increased speed on approaching a village, and pedestrians ran from the road at the sudden uproar of his engine, scattering towards doorways, fences or bushes, people otherwise well-fed and respectable fleeing in horror as he deliberately set his car at any promising group that looked ripe for annihilation.

Jaquiline protested at his attempted murder, but he laughed, and said that this was their only form of gambling, that they actually liked such sport, and so did he, what was more, and that was all that mattered, because what was the point of being chief of police if you couldn't run people down? You might just as well not have a car at all. His hand reached the suspender clip at the top of her stocking, which made his driving more erratic, so that she was too afraid of his mad zig-zags along the road to worry about his distasteful behaviour. Also, she found that these activities, combined with dangerous driving, primed her sensations till she in no way hoped he would stop, assuming in any case that he was simply clearing the road of people to prevent them seeing into the car.

Beyond the village, however, when his hand was engaged in an even more intimate performance upon her, and she felt herself about to swoon into a state not experienced for some time, a forty-ton lorry was approaching at a ferocious speed on the same side of the road. The police chief did not take his hand away, but endeavoured to continue steering his erratic course with the other. The lorry driver, no doubt also wanting his sport, was likewise set in a high-spirited zig-zag track towards them. As if he had tackled the same problem before, the chief of police, when a collision seemed inevitable and Jaquiline was crying out in more than one extreme sense, lifted his foot from the accelerator, and guided the car right off the road.

His speed had not been great, and the field nearby was at the same level, and the soil was hard and fairly flat, so he simply let his Zap run for a clump of bushes, as the passing lorry sounded a long hooter-blast by way of laughing at the defeated sports car.

He carried his half-fainting burden into the bushes, to continue in a more manly fashion what he had begun in the car. When they had finished she felt in no condition to demand an apology. Her mind was on other things, for it seemed all too possible, as he opened the door for her, that by the time they reached the station the Nihilon Express would be gone, and her luggage with it.

The chief of police didn't even try to run at those mistrustful pedestrians forever dodging out of his way, but picked up her thoughts, and said: ‘If the train's gone, we shall follow it to the next stop. And the next, if necessary. That swinish sinister stationmaster won't escape us. We'll catch up with him sooner or later.'

‘It's difficult to believe,' she said, looking at her watch, ‘that I've only been in Nihilon for three hours.'

‘Four. You must have forgotten to change to Nihilon Mean Time. Fortunately, you still have a watch, which is something to be grateful for. If you run out of money you can always sell it.'

‘I'll never do that. My father gave it to me before he died.'

He put his hand on her thigh. ‘I knew you were sentimental. That's why I fell in love with you. Will you sell your watch to me?'

She pushed his hairy, beefy, disgusting hand away. ‘I've told you. I shall never sell it.'

‘Then give it to me, my love.'

‘I'm not your love,' she snapped, still fighting his hand off. ‘Get me on that train and back to my luggage, or I'll denounce you as soon as I arrive in Nihilon City.' He started to grovel, attempting to get down on his knees while still driving the car. ‘You fool!' she cried. ‘Mind the wall. The wall!'

On it was written in white paint:
DOWN WITH NIHILISM. LONG LIVE DAMASCONY. KILL NIL.
He avoided it, but she cried: ‘I forgive you. Please get up. You're forgiven.'

He smiled with happiness, and sat in his seat to drive properly down the straight flat empty road. ‘Say it again,' he pleaded.

‘I forgive you!' – touching his hand as she said it, feeling actual sweet forgiveness for him. With the same rapt smile, and not making any movement of his head, he lifted a hand and struck her hard across the face, saying: ‘Thank you, thank you, my dear, thank you,' as he drove along.

She was sobbing, and he tried to comfort her in his police-chief way, saying that he would like her to stay with him and be his second mistress, that he'd look after her so that she wouldn't have to work more than eight hours a day in the fields or serving in his bookshop at the barbed wire, or assembling lawnmowers at the local factory. He insisted that he loved her more than he did his present wife, or his mistress, or all his children born and unborn, and that if she had a child as a result of their recent encounter in the bushes they would call it Zap, whether boy or girl, after his beloved sports car that had drawn them so close together, a name which would honour their union with an eternal aureole of beauty. At which picturesque phrase he confided that in his spare time, after his duties as police chief, bookseller, gardener, husband, father and lover, he wrote poetry to all things on earth that he thought bright and beautiful, and that from now on and ever after he would compose poems only for her.

He went on talking until she smiled, then laughed, then felt once more tender towards him because she would soon be on the train and far away. When they arrived at the railway station the train was still waiting along the platform. The ticket collector demanded their tickets. ‘I'm accompanying the young foreign lady to the train,' the police chief told him.

‘Are you?' said the truculent ticket collector. ‘Not if I say you can't. You can't.' He examined Jaquiline's ticket, stamped it, and nodded her through to the platform.

‘How long before it leaves?'

‘Five minutes, miss, but maybe an hour. Can't tell. It depends whether the footplate men decide to push the carriages to Nihilon City, or pull them. They are still arguing about it, I believe.'

‘What difference does it make?' she asked.

‘None, really. But they love to make up their minds.'

The chief of police tried to walk through, but the ticket collector barred his way. ‘Let me go, you swine. Can't you see my uniform?'

‘How do I know,' said the ticket collector, ‘that you haven't spent the last six months in your petrol-drum slum-hut in the middle of a field, stitching it together for just such a time as this? And don't call me a swine, you swine!' he raved.

The police chief, while Jaquiline waited patiently to say goodbye, took out his passport and badge.

‘Passports! Badges!' jeered the ticket collector. ‘You can buy those anywhere.'

‘You are under arrest,' siad the chief of police, struggling to unclip his revolver. But the ticket collector reached calmly to a shelf behind and brought out a gun, which he pointed at the police chief's heart: ‘If you go on like this you'll have a guerrilla war on your hands. In fact I hear that one is due to begin any day now. At least I hope so. So get out, before I kick you through the booking-hall.' He turned to Jaquiline, and bowed: ‘You may walk to the train, miss.'

She called goodbye to the rueful police chief, and went to look for her compartment. It was an immensely long train, and multitudes seemed to have got on at this station, for it took several minutes to reach the head of it and find the carriage in which she had left her luggage. When she pulled open the door, the stationmaster was lying along the seat sleeping.

He opened his eyes, and smiled. ‘I was hoping you'd come back. Now we can go to Nihilon City together.'

‘Get out of my compartment,' she said, noting that all her pieces of luggage were on the racks above.

‘I'm tired of being a stationmaster. I want to travel,' he said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

‘Not with me,' she told him, lighting a cigarette.

‘Please,' he asked.

She went back to the door of the train for help. A bell rang, and people along the whole length of it were saying their last goodbyes, pushing bundles into and out of the windows. There was a commotion by the waiting room, where someone was struggling to get through the window and on to the platform. It was the chief of police, and he began running towards her with a gun in his hand, shouting as he got closer: ‘Is he there? Is the pig there?'

He clambered up the steps, and when he reached the compartment, the stationmaster turned pale. ‘I'll come,' he said in a tearful voice. ‘It's the end of a beautiful dream, one that's haunted me ever since I was a child. I had a vision of travelling on the Trans-Nihilon Express in a sleeping compartment with a beautiful woman.'

‘You're a disgrace to Nihilon!' shouted the police chief.

‘I know. But why can't it happen? What's wrong with it? If you both agreed, I could still have my dream.'

‘It would ruin your life,' said the police chief.

‘I want to be ruined,' pleaded the despondent stationmaster. ‘It would clear the air. It would make my life simpler, to have just one dream come true, and to be ruined as well. I've got the moral fibre for it, I swear I have.'

‘Stop it,' pleaded Jaquiline, bursting into tears.

‘You see what you cause by your dreams?' said the police chief. ‘Making someone shed tears is a capital offence in Nihilon.'

Her eyes dried immediately. ‘Is it?'

‘Give me a handkerchief, miss,' pleaded the stationmaster, thumping on to his knees so that she felt the train floor shake under her, ‘to remember you by.'

‘I'd like one, too,' said the police chief, taken by the idea. She had the intolerable thought that if she didn't get rid of them soon, they would both be with her as far as Nihilon City.

When she gave her handkerchief to the police chief he tore it in half, and shared it with the stationmaster. ‘Come on, friend,' he said to him. ‘Let's leave the lady to get some rest.'

She locked the door after them, and the train, with a final campanological peal of bells, jolted and began to move. From the window she saw the stationmaster walking along the platform towards the station exit, pointing a gun at the police chief's back.

The train increased speed, and the last buildings of the small town were left behind. She could hardly believe that the journey to Nihilon City had begun. Dazed with the relief of it, she sat down and smoked another cigarette. Tomorrow she would reach the expansion and comfort of the Grand Nihilon Hotel, and would begin her real work of exploring the capital city. She had promised to meet and share her room with Adam, the poet, in order to continue a love-affair only fitfully begun before setting out for Nihilon. Thinking of it, she recovered her usually alert composure, and decided to change her clothes before going to find the restaurant car.

She lifted a case down and opened it, and for a moment, in the middle of the shock, it seemed that it was not her case, but then she clearly saw her nameplate fastened on the inside of the lid. It was filled with small bundles of kindling wood. She pulled down each case in a frenzy of diminishing hope, but they also were filled with wood.