Heavy, page 1
HEAVY
Introduction
Once upon a time, this author sat down and considered what would happen to the kind of little boys who went through hell in the tropical paradise depicted by William Golding in his Lord of the Flies when they returned to civilisation, shattered and changed by their experiences. As I began to write, my characters became individuals divorced from their moorings; no longer facsimiles of the boys on that island. The island became a different place, a different shape. The world around it grew.
This book is no longer a speculation on the fate of the little boys from that island; it is only a speculation on the fate of little boys from a different island; different little boys, a different war, and a different world. And also a fair few women, because the world contains women, too.
Heavy: One
Pig was in hell.
By his reckoning he’d been in hell for the better part of twenty years, if he was generous and called the time between his older brother William’s black-edged telegram and being sent to Bristol in the wake of Leaked Intelligence, just ahead of half the continent turning to radioactive glass and a mass grave mere purgatory.
Hell this morning had his landlord, Mr Goldstein, give him back his ration book, and some laundry his friend Mr Spiros had taken in as a favour to Mr Goldstein, which was in the main shirts of Pig’s that old blood would not wash out from. Mr Goldstein made a gentle comment on the possibility of Pig assisting in the removal of The Latest Missive.
Pig left for work holding a cold baked thing of unknown nature wrapped in newspaper. On the wall behind him above Mr Goldstein’s window, to the left of Mr Singh’s window, and below his own, read in foot-high red paint which was already beginning to flake: LIARS.
He walked from the Stepney end of Bethnal Green to Shoreditch trying to catch a bus. The sky was clear of cloud and filled with dust as a gang worked on the wobbling remains of what used to be a pawn shop. It had been a wobbling remainder for as long as Pig could remember it, probably since even before the mainland was nuked, but the Municipal Renovation Council for Shoreditch In Greater London had finally made it to the corner.
The ache in his sinuses worsened until he was obliged to put the newspaper-wrapped lunch against what he still laughably thought of as his nostrils, despite their bisection and near-total collapse. The masonry dust felt like needles. He felt sure Mr Goldstein had, once again, pawned his handkerchiefs, though reason told him that, laden with so much old blood, they would be a wretched hard sell. He’d more likely lost them, drunk.
He turned down Old Street. A handful of uniformed Veggie Girls – London Municipal Women’s Food Workers (Vegetables Division) – jumped as he passed them. Some of them looked guilty afterward, the older ones with old tans fading off their faces. The younger ones only looked revolted.
Pig bent his head and took bigger strides. The bus passed, so packed with nurses that nurses spilled off the back platform as it halted for a traffic policeman, who then scrambled back on in a reverse waterfall of starched whites. The bus conductor, a former Overseas Division man with his turban neatly pinned in place, had only one foot on the back platform, his ticket sales tray hanging into the road.
If it had someone’s head off on the corner, Pig supposed, they wouldn’t be short of someone to bandage the bastard up.
Closer to Clerkenwell Road, where a gang digging up ordinance had fouled up the passage of buses regardless, a newspaper seller was roaring his headlines. Pig caught one about the movements of the Front: it had swept down to Kashmir, peeled back from Kabul, and there was a spy uncovered in the Provisional Government at Barca who’d been executed in under an hour and, the newspaper man took a breath, did Pig know he was bleeding?
Pig looked down as another blob of bright red hit the back of his hand, splashed, and hit the pavement. Masonry dust. He put his blood-stained lunch into the pocket of his coat.
“Hankie for a ha’penny?” said the enterprising newspaper man. He coughed into his hand, and Pig took a step back. The roll-up in the corner of the man’s mouth danced, and the smoke lashed at his nose like the vanguard of the dust.
“Go to hell,” Pig muttered.
“Mail?” added the newspaper man, with a flourish. “Costs more than the hankie, ma—sir? But much more h’informative. Sir. Mate.”
“Eat shit,” Pig grumbled, as the blood dried on the scars of his upper lip. The suit was cheap and ill-fitting and by rights a clerical occupation hesitantly pushed Pig from ‘mate’ to ‘Sir’ even if his accent didn’t take him above an “Oi you”. He lowered his head, bled into his palm, and stamped ever-closer to Clerkenwell itself.
At the door Phillips produced a paper handkerchief and a watch.
“You’re late.”
“Buses,” said Pig, taking the handkerchief.
“Bleeding,” observed Phillips. His eyes were watering. He smelled of gin. The desire to wheedle some out of him hit Pig like hot air from a bakery on a cold morning.
“Bastard safety brickies,” Pig observed, jamming the paper handkerchief against the underside of what passed for his nose in location if not in shape. There wasn’t much blood left to catch, but he had to look as if he’d tried.
Phillips shook the watch at him. “Your foot is on the step, Mr Ridell. Don’t go swearin’ on the company’s property, now.”
Pig rolled his eyes. It hurt his eyelids. He shoved past Phillips and his gin breath and his big stupid black face and he walked up the brass-railed staircase past the underwriters’ floor.
The sounds of telephone buttons and dials burst through an open door like sirens.
“Mr Ridell,” said Mr Wallace, the moment his foot crossed the threshold. “You are eighteen minutes late.”
* * *
Maureen dithered between rolling papers and a perfectly good carton of American straights. The calling list in front of her flopped like an admonished schoolgirl over the edge of its wooden cradle, because Golding Holdings, Insurance, and Assurance were too cheap to have metal ones like everyone else, and the paper wouldn’t have passed muster for use in a lavatory, let alone an office.
She contemplated the social implications. On the one hand, the bourgeois indulgence of a straight cigarette would isolate her from her peers and call attention to one’s background and start the whole tedious gossip train chuffing through the floor again as words like ‘conchie’ and ‘commie’ were bandied around as if she were somehow responsible for events which had taken place before she could even speak; on the other the artificial red of her hair had already magnificently isolated her from the false-consciousness-marinating idiots on her floor and would continue to scare and titillate them until the little wretches bothered to read a pamphlet and grasp the nuances of leftist social movements that differentiated workers’ rights from massive nuclear bombardment.
On the other, if she plumped for a rollie they would gas about her being ‘common’ and ‘trying to be something she wasn’t’ and ‘I always knew all those airs were just hot water’, a fascinating collision of concepts but thoroughly a waste of valuable intellectual resources. And they would harp on and on about one’s choice in cigarette but not raise a peep about the stultifying weight of the social class oppression they unthinkingly propped up. It was enough to drive one to drink. There was just no helping some people.
Her neighbour sat down in his seat, late and alarmingly a little blood-stained. He, she thought, had the credence granted to him by obvious service on the field. Whatever he went with, today, would be her antithesis. Mr Ridell could set the tone for her small rebellions.
“Mr Ridell,” she said brightly, gesturing to both the rolling papers and the straights. “Care for a smoke?”
He scowled at her – it was hard to tell, given the scars that had turned his face into what looked like several consecutive horizontal slices of face, but the chap did seem to scowl an awful lot – and made a half movement towards the dried blood on his lip, the pink twisted lines that ran through the bridge of his nose and cheeks, pulling his eye sockets down and his mouth up.
“I can’t smoke.”
“Oh yes, of course,” Maureen said, without a flicker of embarrassment. On the other side of her, Lily Dawkins tutted extravagantly and picked up her handset again.
“Some of us have lists to get through,” said Lily, loudly.
“Some of us want to try minding our own business and working on our own lists then, don’t we?” said Maureen, readjusting a hair pin. Her hair felt brittle and stiff, but on the whole as long as it didn’t get in her mouth while she was speaking she felt the multitude of small metal points had done their job.
Lily Dawkins tutted again and began to dial.
“Do you have a list ready, Mr Ridell?” Maureen asked, opting for the rolling papers because she could put off dialling a little longer if she took her time, and because Lily Dawkins had loudly commented how much it made her look like a man and how she would absolutely never find a sweetheart with yellow fingers last time. American straights, of course, carried a certain social cachet even though most of the Americans had long since left, abandoning Britain almost entirely as they’d abandoned the radiation-scarred corpse of the mainland. “You should have F, you know. I have half of D and all of E and Lily here has half of D, don’t you, Lily dear?”
“Don’t dear me,” Lily muttered under her breath, “Giving yourself airs.”
Mr Ridell looked at his desk, grunted his assent, and reached for the telephone handset.
Maureen rolled her cigarette slowly. A good job it might be, she thought, b ut one probably stood more chance of radicalising a shop floor in a factory – or finding a sympathetic comrade in one of the Municipal gangs. Everyone was too jolly cosy here. Mr Wallace might pinch their bottoms occasionally – not hers, she acknowledged with an inward smile, because he’d bruise his hand on the bones – and the windows didn’t close and one rarely exactly enjoyed being told to ‘piss off’ six times in an hour over the telephone, but it wasn’t as if there were the sort of privations that really galvanised a worker on this floor.
“Good morning, Mrs Danes,” said Lily, beside her, in her best Telephone Voice. “This is Golding Holdings, Insurance, and Assurance. We understand that your husband has a position handling munitions work and we would like to offer our services ensuring that whatever befalls him in the line of his excellent service to the country, yourself and your children will be cared for amply. Has your husband taken out one of our fine policies before?”
Maureen licked the side of her rolling papers.
She acknowledged, as she ran her eye down the typeface list – Mrs Drake, French Wheat Import, telephone number – that one could scarcely rely upon boredom to move workers into organising. If it were the case, she thought, they’d have the finest union of telephone sales clerks in the country at Golding Holdings and she would be their most qualified member.
She took out her matches, and suppressed a sigh.
* * *
By five Pig’s stomach had enough noisy complaints that one of his calls had remarked on its volume.
He clocked out. Mr Wallace gave a pointed speech to all of the telephone callers – Simpkins with his one wooden leg, Marks with his missing eye, and a sea of girls and mothers – about the importance of arriving on time, which became a speech about the correct telephone manner, which became a speech about duty, and in an aimless way concluded with some of Mr Wallace’s Important Thoughts about the role of well-insured families in a well-defended nation.
At half-past five Pig stamped past Glover, who had taken over from Phillips, and who didn’t smell of gin.
He stamped back down Clerkenwell Road. He stamped back down Old Street. He strode through to the rubble of the wobbling pawn shop, and he stopped dead outside a darkened butcher’s shop window with the dry heaves.
A butcher’s boy, his voice high and sweet and beautiful as a piccolo, a county choir treble piping the much-coveted solo, squeaked rapturously to a fellow that they’d got a pig in. Real pork, the whole animal. Mr Gerard knew a man at Smithfields, didn’t he.
Pig needed no shop front mirror to tell him his face was ashen. He slumped against the wall and let dry nausea clamp his throat shut.
Black rocks and grey sea. Barely a blade of grass. A speckling of small white flowers. The sea birds. The white foam on the waves. A voice, high and sweet and beautiful, a choir voice, a boy’s voice that carried on the wind.
We found a pig.
He passed his hand in front of his face. The sounds of the street subsided to a thick, bloody soup somewhere inside his ears, and the choking died down.
Pig put his hot face against the cold tile on the wall. Soot stuck to sweat. His skin twitched.
Another fifteen minutes of walking brought him to an open window in a non-descript house at the end of a gappy row of Edwardian slum-cleared homes. He distinctly heard a woman complain about the stink; scaffolds covered the frames of the houses that had taken direct hits. Scorch marks still graced the surrounding walls, but in the faltering light there were saxifrage, yellow frumirory, rosebay, even buddleia beginning to grow as more and more bricks were surreptitiously stolen.
He banged the heel of his hand on the open wooden shutter.
“I paid,” snapped an accent that Pig had only ever been able to identify as ‘somewhere between Helmand and Bombay’. “I paid Josser on time last week. You ask him.”
Pig ignored this and banged a second time.
A head, bare and thick with black hair, appeared at the window. “Oh,” it said, relaxing. “You want food?”
Pig produced tuppence.
“No meat,” said the head, disappearing. He reeled off an instruction to someone in the darkness, a language Pig recognised but had never understood. In English he heard, “Scar face, yes?” and shortly afterward the head reappeared.
“No meat?” Pig confirmed, as he was handed an open piece of flat bread with some yellow glop in it which steamed savagely.
“No meat,” the head agreed. “Very hot. Okay?”
Pig looked at the steaming yellow matter, concerned more with the confirmation and its relief than the temperature of the food. No meat. “Spicy hot?”
“Spicy hot.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
At the corner of Mr Goldstein’s street there was a pub whose name board had already been removed when Pig moved into the old Jew’s boarding house. It had once been painted blue. Outside, men with whip-thin dogs and women with fourth-hand coats swore at each other. It was not a respectable pub and Mr Goldstein didn’t like how close it was to his lodging-house. He suspected, he’d told Pig after he moved in, that the drinkers there were responsible for his regular defacements.
Pig drank there because they only stopped selling him their watered-down ale when he was lying on the floor.
This evening he raised a glass to Lucy, who had thrown him out most recently, and to Ivy, who had thrown him out before that, and to Greta, who had thrown him out and screamed at him from the window until someone had telephoned for the police.
He was sick in the street drain two doors before Mr Goldstein’s house at ten, in the darkness of the eternal black-out. Over the remaining flakes of LIARS someone had painted the word COMMIE.
* * *
Maureen woke three times in the night: once for the drill, which was the responsibility of her neighbourhood this month; once to help Mummy with their neighbour, Mr Spoons, who had one of his Turns and was crying in his garden in what was left of his uniform; and once just before the sun came up, when Diane climbed in through her window and explained in hissed, breathless sentences that she was awfully sorry, she knew she’d said three, but they’d managed to get into the Embassy after all and one of the chaps there had been graced with a shipment of Khat and one thing had led to another and it was difficult to find anywhere that allowed one to dance after midnight—
She closed the window and went back to sleep while her sister was still talking.
Mummy was listening to the wireless when she got up for breakfast.
Maureen gave half an ear to the ceaseless churn of places people were being sent to die. She gave a little more of an ear to some exultant, intended-to-be-intercepted reports on the progress of food crops in the Fallout Nations. Of course, with even fewer people left alive there than in Britain to run the farms, it was hard to see how they were supposed to keep themselves fed, never mind exporting to their hungry neighbours. And the babies born on the Continent just weren’t surviving long enough, but at least they had crops for the radio. France Is Fertile!
This, she thought, investigating the almost-egg on her toast, meant more cynically that French Wheat was still probably killing people, just more slowly than it had been. The propaganda writers at Whitehall should come up with a new set of slogans and be more realistic: ‘Greek Cheese: You’ll get cancer but there’s a good chance you’ll be conscripted first’.
“Did you still want to borrow the wooden chairs for tonight?” Mummy asked, cutting through this thought.
“Mm-hmm,” said Maureen, her mouth full.
“Swallow,” Diane said, from behind smoked glasses.
“No, it’s quite alright,” said Maureen, glaring at her sister. “I spoke to the Church Hall and they said they would prefer if I didn’t hold the meeting there so we have to move to the other hall, and they already have chairs.”
Mummy frowned. “Is this the hall in Islington?”
“It’s perfectly safe,” said Diane, with a hard stare at Maureen which Maureen knew meant only too well, Now you can’t squeal about the Khat, “There’s a Watch all down that street, I’m sure if there were any trouble Maureen would alert them.”
The conversation veered into a steady enquiry over Diane’s whereabouts the previous evening, and Maureen tried to force more of her breakfast into herself. The wireless – Mummy had certainly changed her tune about not listening to that over the breakfast table – moved on to “the generation who have no consciousness of ‘49” in disapproving tones, harping on the two-decade anniversary. How on earth could they be expected to volunteer for service, the general question seemed to be, when they had no memory of the terrible fear that had led half the country to slit their own wrists – rather than face the A-Bombs? Conscription had to stay, and it was the fault of the Youth.
