Inner Circle Read online

  ‘How did the cat manage to get out, Joked’

  ‘Out of what!’ said Sailor and tugged at my belt.

  ‘Out of the milk pond.’ He was satisfied.

  ‘The cat churned and churned his blue saucer,’ said Joker beaming all over his moon face, ‘until he made a pondful of butter. Then he walked out, leaving a trail of paw-marks on the butter, so we caught him not far from those reeds.’

  ‘Who caught him, Joked?’ Sailor looked worried and Rain’s blue eyes switched off the last smile. September sighed.

  ‘You and me, Sailor, us both.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Sailor, ‘there is no more cat.’ And he set the circle in slow motion on his own initiative which astonished me.

  ‘We have a big saucer in the middle,’ Joker pointed at our free space, enclosed by our trotting feet. This was his first attempt at discovery and he looked puzzled and much amused.

  ‘This is called saucer. Saucer.’ Repeating the word, September grasped the analogy.

  ‘But it isn’t blue,’ said Rain. I marvelled at her display of intelligence, even though it was achieved at the expense of the cat whom I knew she had suddenly forgotten. My coincidental family was making progress. It seemed to matter less that we were only a minute inner circle surrounded by loops, zigzagging streaks and millions of dithering dots.

  Stationary for a while, with my back to the crowds, I felt a new commotion like the first murmur of a tide. Then followed a splash, voices breaking against a loud voice, riding high against a communal sound barrier.

  ‘Can you see anything, Sailor’ He was the tallest in the circle but he had neither Leeds’s neck nor its agility. With his right hand above his eyes he was endangering the continuity of the circle, then he made a funny face to please Joker, dropped his hand and muttered in his usual drowsy way:

  ‘It’s not this box and it’s not the other. Can’t look over too many heads, it sends my eyes to sleep.’

  ‘Look again, Sailor.’ But this time I could hear the voice, each word magnified by the air. It seemed to resound against the domes and come down through their purple and golden haloes.

  ‘Listen—listen to the good tidings! A tree—a true tree—was born in the West under the open sky—and it is alive. It will bear fruit-and the fruit will multiply. And believe me—no storm from inside the sea—no fire from beyond the sky roof will prevail-against the tree!’

  I strained my neck and my eyes, and saw head after head turn towards the voice.

  The third box, Rain cried, the third from us; she couldn’t possibly have seen it, she was shorter than September, but I believed her and stood on tiptoes. Yes, there was a man on the top of a box, the third in the distance after the one to which Leeds had clung for weeks. The man seemed much older than any of us, he was in fact a strange exception to the age rule which bound us here to a communal identity, similar habits and health.

  ‘Why has he forgotten to die?’ September said. Like Rain, she saw the man without using her eyes.

  I noticed that we had stopped circling. There was a hush over us and over those unaccountable people facing the box from which the man had spoken.

  ‘We hear thunder.’ Joker was nudging Sailor, who couldn’t hear a thing because he had fallen asleep. ‘They’re coming!’ a woman shrieked behind the box nearest to us.

  Metal discs started popping up everywhere, tubes gushed out from the earth and swayed like snakes before collapsing into the loosened clods. There was suddenly dust at the level of our ankles, thickening as it rose.

  Before the panic seized the people by their knees and necks and threw them down in heaps, I saw the old man on the box stagger and disappear through the roof as if it had a trap panel. And immediately another female cry reached me from the whirlpool of dust.

  ‘They’re crushing everything! They are here!’

  My circle was broken. Joker and Sailor had jumped into the nearest box and slammed the door behind them. I grabbed my wives and somehow managed to push their small hands through the hooks on my belt, then I fell to the ground, pulling them down.

  My arms were trying to embrace the corner of the box. The stampede was already upon us. I received a knock on my head and back, I felt a stinging pain all down my right leg.

  Oh, we were too healthy on this island to cheat pain by losing consciousness. Thunder after thunder convulsed the surface.

  Then I felt a soothing coldness on my neck. It spread and was followed by a different hush than that before the stampede.

  ‘It’s rain,’ said my first wife.

  ‘It’s the greatest rain I ever thought of,’ said my second wife. And the rain was rinsing our hair, sparking off pebbles from the ground, whizzing over the grit in the hollows.

  ‘They’ve sent it down to stop the panic.’ I meant the skymen.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Dover,’ I heard a voice bending over me. ‘I couldn’t think of any faster means of transport to reach you at this very same spot. Get up, Dover, you’re quite all right. My stampede was not as bad as it sounded.’

  I looked up and saw his condescending neck.

  ‘You need another pair of hands in your circle, Dover. The five of you couldn’t hold out.’ Leeds lifted me up and clasped my hand. ‘Where are those brothers of yours?’

  And then we witnessed a sight in the half-opened skies. A rainbow hung there, reflecting a small tree. Raindrops shimmered all over the reflection, as if the tree wore a robe for this annunciation.

  3

  ‘Shut the door,’ said Joker, ‘we can’t hear a thing.’ I squeezed myself in and smelt the familiar odour of disinfectants, then perfume, both quickening the desire to touch, watch and recollect. ‘That’s where we come from, I think.’ Sailor was pointing at the underground map of Britain, flashing section after section against a net of squares, which seemed to be suspended beyond the wall of the box. This was how images appeared, extending the tangible area. Sailor knocked his fingers badly, when he tried again to show a line on the map.

  ‘We could hear a train before you came in. You know there are trains running under England, from Dover to Leeds, from London to Durham, places like that, and that’s where we come from.’

  ‘From down there,’ Joker said.

  ‘Oh, yes—I would like now to be on the small Inner Circle and on the big one which doesn’t stop at many places. You see names flicker by and then it’s York, you don’t get off, because you want to go round a full circle, London to London, all the time under the coast, with waves splashing three thousand feet over your head. It’s fun, and that’s where we came from, Joker and me.’

  ‘And you, too, I think,’ Joker said. He tried to embrace me but there wasn’t enough room for that. Then the box started exhaling whiffs of petrol and fried fish, a saucer rolled by, milk oozed from one of the squares and a puzzled cat walked right across the map and vanished, it seemed, into Joker’s hair.

  ‘That’s him,’ said Sailor, ‘the pond will come next.’

  But it didn’t. Instead, for a well-focused moment we saw a boy munching a sandwich on an Underground platform. A poster behind him said Top People Wear Hats.

  ‘He looks like you, Dover.’ I felt Sailor’s finger on my nose. ‘Though he could be me,’ he added. Then his voice thickened. ‘It’s time I had a wife or two, you know.’

  As he was saying this, the screens around the wall merged into one another, the net remained behind them but now it looked more like grating with several paler bars reinforcing a further background. Animals emerged, big, small and partly visible, they paced along the net, yawning and sneezing, then the smaller of them began to leap through the squares, somehow missing us by an inch or less, then they reappeared, one by one, on the screen opposite.

  ‘I should have a couple of wives, you know,’ Sailor whispered into my ear and his hot fingers fondled my elbow for a while.

  ‘That bitchdog stinks,’ Joker made a spitting noise. ‘She’s on heat. Keep away from her, Sailor.’ He tried his bes
t, now leaning against me, now against his brother.

  Across the full length of the screen an elongated spaniel was mounting the bitch, regardless of the bars and squares, his enthusiastic tail whipping his own behind as his head moved back and forward. After the dogs, pigeons and hens flapped their wings. The cackling was hysterical, and feathers flew about for the arrival of the cock, who made a jumping entry into the turmoil, copulated briskly from hen to hen, glancing at us sideways with a beady, cynical eye. Now, gentlemen, I’m not boasting, it’s just a job and it’s already done.

  Animals were our educators: we hardly ever viewed human performances.

  Sometimes by mistake a scene from the surface registered itself on the screens as it was taking place outside: a standing couple, a standing copulation. Or the memory would I throw up a picture on to a confusion of hind legs, tails, tongues and beaks. Now it came. I remembered and simultaneously saw, and they saw with me. Rain, bending forward, September supporting Rain’s head with her legs; my belly flattened against Rain’s buttocks, trying to raise them. She bent farther down, sweat from her spine now trickling towards the neck, and the whole balance of Rain’s body seemed to flow into the knees and the hands below them.

  ‘Rain, I have your eyes now’—and the feathery, cackling noise fell upon September’s words.

  ‘And were we then your brothers?’ Sailor asked me when the picture vanished.

  ‘I don’t remember. Let’s get out of here.’ Joker helped me to find the lock on the door.

  In the pale blue of late afternoon Leeds had prepared an acrobatic surprise for me.

  With every muscle proclaiming his sturdy masculinity, he displayed Rain and September swinging from his arms. Very slowly he turned round, his arms locked in a clasp behind that turret of a neck.

  ‘I’ll give you three guesses, Dover.’

  I stood in silence, nudged and jostled by the passers-by. Feeding-time was near.

  ‘We are a tree,’ Rain explained. She couldn’t possibly wait through my hesitation.

  ‘A trunk and two branches. I am drooping with rain.’

  ‘We are also the scales of September in the sign of Libra,’ my second wife said.

  Remember, remember. I couldn’t remember whether I had even made love to her.

  Perhaps she only held the other’s head and balanced the act like that scale in the Zodiac sign.

  ‘And I am a water-carrier,’ said Leeds, ‘with two pails swaying under my arms. I have to walk and walk. Which reminds me, Dover. The girls, your wives I mean, are keen on a long walk. As far as the tree.’

  ‘The tree?’ A stay in the box, however brief, had its side effect: I felt dense and dopey. A headache was throbbing in my temples.

  ‘The girls say they actually saw it in the sky. The tree apparent, you might call it that. Anyway, Dover, we’re going to have a sort of pilgrimage as in the days of yore.’

  ‘Once upon the other side of time there was a solitary tree—’ Joker began and stopped, giving his brother a wink. ‘You go on, Sailor, it’s your story.’

  ‘It’s nobody’s story,’ Sailor said, stretching his hand out. ‘Besides, how can you tell anything without having a circle ?’

  ‘I am coming!’ Rain jumped off Leeds’s arm as though it were a real branch, hugged me with a strange, wistful softness in her finger tips, but September didn’t follow her: she was still swinging, Leeds straining his neck to keep the balance. Finally he put her down.

  ‘A water-carrier must have two pails,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that right, Dover?’

  ‘We’re weak without a circle.’ And I took September’s hand.

  ‘You are my first husband, Dover,’ she announced this like a discovery. ‘And I am his first wife. It’s nice to have two scales in September.’ She beckoned to Leeds to join our family. He tried to do it gracefully, with a deep bowing gesture, but in the middle of the bow a puffed-up man dumped his wobbly belly on his behind and seemed glad to meet such a convenient obstacle. I laughed, then laughed again, bursting my first bubble of jealousy at this ridiculous sight. But it also brought back the memory of the erotic scene, and brief anger replaced jealousy.

  Willy-nilly, I found in Leeds a co-maker of relationships. The circle was in full swing.

  And our journey to the West began. We were making for the coast, so Leeds assured us, but nothing in the air or in the colours ahead indicated a change of scenery.

  Only the distances between the boxes seemed a little shorter, though this could have been an illusion of movement. We certainly moved faster, edging groups of people, bypassing altogether those corridors of traffic which went parallel to a double row of boxes. Leeds was tireless in giving advice and trying to impress us. His neck acted as a permanent guide, his elbows as ploughshares through a thick crowd. He also invented a revolving pulley which did pull and did go round, but in fact consisted of his two hands on our joined arms, giving a push here, a push there, with Leeds remaining on the outside like our satellite. Someone called him that, probably Sailor, who knew a bit of astronomy from the screens, and Leeds must have been pleased because he pushed even harder at our turning hoop. From time to time he let us hear his statistical figures which he had been working out in his head.

  ‘It’s one man per one square yard on the average. Which should be ample. But you have to take away twenty-five square yards or so out of every fifteen hundred for the area occupied by the boxes. That’s why the congestion differential is not easy to apply.

  With two people swinging on your arms, however, you could improve the ratio, but that, of course, would require quite a few mobile squads of athletes.’

  We never talked about the purpose of our pilgrimage, the tree. Now and again Rain would be on the point of mentioning it, but somehow a gesture imitating a branch or a static pose satisfied her. On the day we reached the Safety Zone my brothers became restless, they muttered to themselves, dozed off for several minutes at a time, then couldn’t get rid of their dreams. When the first warning notice came up through the hazy, oppressive air, Sailor at last found the words to express his anxiety:

  ‘A tree is for hanging, I am telling you, and it’s usually a sailor who dangles from the rope.’ Joker nodded in approval, his moon face reflecting a remote once-upon-a-time mood.

  ‘And when the sailor had a brother they used to hang them both for good company. It’s no joke being a brother,’ Joker said in my direction.

  I felt the sand loosening under my steps. Rain didn’t like the sensation and dragged her feet. Leeds, being heavier, seemed to he walking with a limp. The landscape became crooked and we came up to a box which had no door and was sagging from the slope of a dune together with a wide yellow board. A warning in black letters jumped at us from the yellow:

  You are entering the Safety Zone. You will Bet no food, no air heating, no protection. Domes end 100 yards after this point.

  We all turned our faces upwards. September let my hand go and I heard her trembling voice.

  ‘I can see the colours—four of them—falling into a pit.’

  In fact she saw the beginning of grey clouds evenly spread over the coast. I didn’t mind that the circle was breaking up, each clasp released from the pressure of fingers.

  Only a hundred yards: how many steps were required to test this distance? The distance was echoing the invisible sea, like a shell.

  ‘It’s old rain from the open sky lying on the ground,’ Rain said to September, not knowing how to describe the noise of the sea; and arm-in-arm they walked ahead, like sisters rather than wives. But not for long. Their arms dropped and Rain staggered. Then September fell into the sand. She picked herself up and stumbled again.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Leeds asked, but didn’t move forward.

  ‘Can’t you see they are unable to walk? Let’s go and help them.’

  Leeds hesitated. He looked back at the warning sign and then his neck became all veins and bulging red blobs. His head seemed to be screwed into fear.

 
‘You go, Dover. I’ll follow you presently.’ And to my great surprise he followed me, stooping and testing the sand with each step. I shouldn’t have turned to watch him.

  My eyes blinked and were suddenly filled with salty air which ached. The salty moisture settled on my lips, and before I could wipe it off each feature on my face felt numb.

  I reached the women on all fours, leaving Leeds a couple of yards behind me.

  ‘I am sick,’ September was retching into the wet sand but nothing came out of her mouth. Her wriggling fit had just left her, she managed to raise herself on her knees. So did Rain and Leeds behind us. We were all crouching, incapable of standing up or frightened to do so. That crouching position, the strain in the knees, the sweat down the spine; so much like our sexual act, now disarmed of passion, feeble, self-mocking, having its nose rubbed in the sand.

  ‘The space . . .’ September whispered into my hot face, ‘it’s terrible, so terrible without people.’ ‘We’ve grown accustomed to moving in crowds and circles,’ I said.

  ‘We’re bound to lose balance without a human prop.’

  ‘But I thought I was born in the sign of balance.’

  ‘I know, September, I know. Remember, remember. . . .’

  She interrupted my memory verse:

  ‘Leeds showed me the scales on his arms. Where is Leeds?’

  ‘There,’ I said, and an ugly tone of satisfaction prompted my next words: ‘He’s on all fours, as well as you and me.’

  When finally Leeds crawled up to us, he made a fool of himself by trying to amend his previous statistical revelation:

  ‘One man per one square yard is a reasonable average in our spacial circumstances, but sometimes you have to allow for factors like primitive sand and a surface vacuum which wasn’t caused by a stampede. This proves, of course, that we are being well looked after.’