Heavy, p.9
Heavy, page 9
She hoped he wasn’t imagining it.
* * *
In Walthamstow she pulled the car up three doors down from the target.
“Is he still breathing, Mr.—?”
The CR didn’t fill her in with his name. He just said, “Yes,” and waited.
The street had trees planted in it. Some of the houses had window boxes. It was what people called an aspirational area: people who made their modest money and now wanted to be out of the filth where they made it.
Irene knew she stood out like a sore thumb. She also knew that her uniform shirt was light dove Grey and her tie was dark steel Grey and that these colours, not the colour of her skin or the inability of her hair to conform to regulation standards, were what people saw, what they should see.
She got out of the Morris, and beckoned the CR. He had to struggle, but he was careful not to knock the bundle in his arms.
It was very obvious as they walked to the front door of a man whose file described him as a coward and a petty criminal that what the CR had with him was a human body, wrapped in a blanket. Irene prayed silently that no one was peering out of their white-curtained windows.
The light was dim through the clouds. The day was not yet warm. Irene Gaitskill reached up to rap on a well-painted door.
Mr Rodney Haxonbury observed, not for the first time, that his house was the better for his wife not being in it. It wasn’t so much her presence that was the problem, he thought, as he looked at his breakfast with keen appreciation, more that her presence also entailed the presence of his offspring, which in turn entailed the presence of a great deal of shouting, and Julietta disliked shouting, and Mrs. Haxonbury disliked Julietta, and the girls didn’t like Julietta and Mrs. Haxonbury shouting at each other, and without them the only sounds were the tick of the cuckoo clock Mrs. Haxonbury insisted on having in the dining room and the faint clink of Julietta in the kitchen.
There was a soft-boiled egg.
The soldiers looked rather more like Medical Invalidations than serving men, because the flaming baker used God-alone-knew-what to bulk out his flour and Mrs. Haxonbury felt that baking was Beneath Her now and Julietta couldn’t make leavened bread. This was compounded, Mr. Haxonbury had been loudly assured by Julietta in accented English, by the absence of any good knives with which to cut bad bread.
Mrs. Haxonbury had stated, before she went off on her Holidays with the girls, that as Julietta was Foreign and not to be trusted, the good knives would be remaining under lock and key, and if she found they’d been used in her absence she would have to assume they had been Stolen.
Mr. Haxonbury refrained from pointing out that he knew how to pick a damn lock because Mrs. Haxonbury really did not like to be reminded of this.
He regarded his egg fondly. There were assorted benefits to his position in the world, Mr. Haxonbury felt. For the odd inconvenience and threat, you got a startlingly good degree of protection and being his brother’s brother – well, half-brother – got him access to real eggs even when the nobs in the west of the city could scarcely lay hand on one with an intact shell.
That was what Mrs. Haxonbury didn’t understand, he thought.
He ate his egg with relish. This afternoon he would be required to oversee the redistribution of army-branded pills to Certain Civilian Outlets who might pass them on at a considerable mark-up to customers eager not to Increase The Population Burden while still enjoying a certain amount of freedom of expression, so to speak. But in the meantime, the morning was his, and his business could, with a bit of luck, run itself.
He dabbed at his moustache. Julietta removed his plate without so much as a word and stamped away to the kitchen.
There was a rap on the door. Mr. Haxonbury frowned at the door, and remained in his seat. It was too early for the postman and too late for the milkman, and the associates of his half-brother didn’t call him at home – one of the advantages of family connection – and the only other option was some Church type collecting for the unmanageable.
Mr. Haxonbury sipped his tea. In the absence of his wife, who felt it was Beneath Them Both now, he had heaped four teaspoons of beet sugar into the stewed cup and had Julietta break into one of the tins of condensed milk. He tried to jolly her along with a conspiratorial nudge at the latter, but she only stared at him coldly and said something in Spanish that he was sure wasn’t complimentary.
There was another rap at the door.
Julietta returned.
“Someone is knocking,” she said.
“Before the day starts,” said Mr. Haxonbury, “That is your responsibility.”
“The day is started,” said Julietta, folding her arms. She had the kind of arms that could quite easily, Mr. Haxonbury was sure, break a roof beam in half.
“Never the less, Julietta, I am drinking my tea,” said Mr. Haxonbury, his eye twitching. He raised the cup to show her.
“Julietta,” she corrected, crossly.
“That’s what I said.”
There was a third rap at the door. Julietta raised her eyebrows and folded her arms even more pointedly.
Mr. Haxonbury finished his cup of tea and set it down on the saucer with an officious click. He rose to his feet, pushed his chair back in – Mrs. Haxonbury would be pleased, he thought, she was always on at him to do that – and walked in stockinged feet to the front door.
He opened his door.
There were two people standing on his doorstep and even the most cursory glance ruled out Church types. It ruled out beggars, jobbing bricklayers, associates of his half-brother, employees of his, the milkman’s boy, the postman, the man from the telephone company who’d said he would come back to listen to the line and then never did…
Mr. Haxonbury closed his mouth carefully and touched his moustache.
“Excuse me,” he said, drawing the door against his side. “Is there something I might help you with?”
“Yes,” said the short, dark woman with the hair of a Negress and the uniform of what looked a bit like one of the Municipal Teams, if a little more military. “You can do your duty to your country, Mr. Haxonbury.”
Mr. Haxonbury blinked. “I pay my taxes,” he said, automatically.
“No,” said the dark little woman, “you don’t.”
“How dare you,” Mr. Haxonbury said mildly.
“Mr. Haxonbury,” said the dark little woman, staring up at him with a stony expression, “you distribute illegal substances.”
“I refute this accusation utterly,” said Mr. Haxonbury, drawing himself up to his full height. He was pitifully aware that this full height was significantly less than that of the man standing behind her holding what was either a roll of carpet or a corpse.
“You will find that difficult,” said the dark woman. “Mr. Haxonbury, we have no desire to alert Her Majesty’s Revenue Collectors to your taxation affairs, Her Majesty’s Controlled Substances Officers to your secondary business, nor even Her Majesty’s Constabulary to the connection you have to a number of extortion-related activities in the North East London area—”
“That is nothing to do with me,” Mr. Haxonbury snapped, meaning to slam the door but finding he’d inadvertently placed himself in the way. “Young woman, I am a respectable businessman and you are trespassing.”
“Mr. Haxonbury,” said the extremely rude woman, “I am an employee of Her Majesty’s Government and you are a criminal, and under the Statute of 1950-1 regarding the aversion of seditious or subversive acts against the Crown and Country, I am in fact empowered to burst into your house at this moment if you do not give me your fullest, and most confidential cooperation.”
Mr. Haxonbury deflated. “What cooperation do you want, exactly?”
The woman in the uniform said, “We require your cooperation in the recuperation of this man.”
The silent, heavily-scarred man standing behind her proffered his rolled-up burden.
Mr. Haxonbury took a step backwards. “He looks dead.”
“He isn’t,” said the rude woman on his doorstep. “But if he dies in your care you can be sure there will be dire consequences.”
Mr. Haxonbury blinked rapidly, and his eye began to twitch again. “Now look here.”
“Your housemaid, I believe, used to work as a nurse in the Enclave at Barca?”
Mr. Haxonbury blinked harder. He lowered his voice. “How… how do you know all this?”
The rude woman standing in front of his house pointed to the collar of her uniform shirt. “What colour is this, Mr. Haxonbury?”
A large, hitherto unnoticed lump appeared in Mr. Haxonbury’s oesophagus. He turned, ever so slightly, and called: “Julietta.”
The wretched woman appeared behind him as if she had been waiting for the chance. He succeeded in not jumping out of his own skin by the merest whisker.
“We’re just going to… we have a very unwell guest,” said Mr. Haxonbury, nodding as the scarred man pushed his way into the house. “I would appreciate if you would—”
Julietta ignored him, and followed the scarred man into the front room.
Mr. Haxonbury dithered on his doorstep.
The Greyshirt woman in front of him said, “Your service to your country is appreciated, Mr. Haxonbury.”
Mr. Haxonbury felt his soft-boiled egg trying to escape from his stomach and muttered, “Just doing my duty, absolutely delighted,” into his moustache with more sarcasm than he’d intended.
The scarred man returned, without blanket and without body. He stepped back through Mr. Haxonbury’s threshold. He looked as if he’d taken a nose-dive through barbed wire some years ago, Mr. Haxonbury thought, with a horrified detachment, and he was powerfully ugly in consequence.
“I hardly need remind you,” added the rude woman, in her soft, Church voice, “we will be keeping an eye on you.”
No, Mr. Haxonbury thought, as the two strangers departed from his doorstep and got into a maroon Morris. No, they hardly needed to remind him. To implicitly believe that Reggie was not lying when he said that They had all the phones tapped, the mail opened, that every third person reported back to Them, and that they were to be trusted even less than a bent copper, well – that was one thing. Reggie was usually right when he aired his arcane and often oppressive knowledge of the unknown, but it still held a sense of the unreal. The patina of a wireless drama played out in the evenings after the news.
That was one thing. Having the blighters show up on his ruddy doorstep and foist a corpse onto him was quite another.
He went into the front room.
Julietta had rolled back the military blanket and propped a cushion under the man’s head.
The settee had been a bequest from a man Rodney understood to be his uncle, although their Mam had also implied on one occasion that Uncle George might also be Rodney’s father, whom he’d never met, or Reggie’s father, whom Reggie and Rodney had understood to be in prison, once she’d stopped telling them he died in France because the timeline didn’t add up right.
It was upholstered in fabric Mrs. Haxonbury didn’t like, because it clashed with the wallpaper she’d chosen. Above the settee were three pottery flying ducks, carefully hung from nails in the wall. Mrs. Haxonbury had taken down the framed photograph of one of the Haxonbury Vans because she said it made them look like they were in Trade.
The man lying on Mr. Haxonbury’s inherited settee was sallow and his breath was almost imperceptible. He had deep hollows under his eyes that looked like bruises. Some of his hair – very curly hair, very dark – had come out. It was impossible to tell how old he might be, Mr. Haxonbury thought, only that he had not gone grey yet.
He looked unnatural humped up under the blanket.
Mr. Haxonbury smoothed down his moustache.
He was under surveillance. They were watching him. They – the same They that Reggie had always warned him of and Mrs. Haxonbury pooh-poohed the very existence of – knew here he lived. They knew about his Tax Arrangement. They knew about Julietta’s previous work; they probably even knew her last name, which was more than he could swear to himself. They knew everything.
The thought made the egg try to return on him. He patted his moustache nervously, while the caved-in body of a stranger lay unconscious in his front room. Julietta had closed the curtains.
Mrs. Haxonbury was probably going to kill him.
Heavy: Six
Comrade Lin attends to the distribution of further materials. There is a new edict, requiring the discovery of the worms which eat at the heart of the great conjoined nations, which seek to undermine the Great Leader and the Party and to turn the SinoSoviet alliance against itself. Rightists are hidden in the warp and weft of society, and all enemies of the people must be reported.
She has lived through several such edicts, but this time there is more than her questionable heritage to pass her heart into her throat with such violence that her hand is affected, and she is forced to rewrite Like Crows, We Will Pluck The Worms of Rightist Propaganda From The Minds Of The Young, To Save Them From The Rot. Comrade Wu gives her another sheet of paper and a short lecture about the necessity of conserving papers and ink.
She has scoured the People’s Daily every day for further messages all through March. Sometimes there are some; sometimes there are none. The most recent told her to be alert to the possibility of a new Caesar Code; to use the same for all this time would be folly.
Another folly, she acknowledges, blotting ink with a square of cloth, is this communication. Now, as they sit poised upon the brink of what will undoubtedly be the last cleanse needed to remove pollution from the minds of the people and enlighten them to the path forward, it is dangerous beyond measure to exchange words in code. Who placed these codes within the People’s Daily? Surely the editors would like to know? Drawing out a traitor would be worth a commendation: if these words had some weight, perhaps, they might validate their existence, but they covered banalities.
When the Rightists tempt, a previous edict had mentioned, they do so with luxuries they cannot provide. They will talk of sweet drinks, plentiful meat, cars for all, air conditioning, Greta Garbo movies. They will insult the very core of SinoSoviet life with assumptions of your greed and weakness. They will believe you are as soft and biddable as they are, whisked about by the winds of capital as a wind chime; they will see you starve as they are starving.
This communicator, by definition, cannot not be a Rightist.
She sweats discreetly into the band of her cap. To remove it would be the wiser course, but to remove it will see her hair blown about by Comrade Wu’s necessary expenditure of an electric fan: too far from her to provide comfort and too close to keep her presentable.
No temptation was offered in the hidden words. No condemnation of the Party or the Great Leader. The questions were grandmotherly, singular, and concerned: did she keep in good health? Were conditions satisfactory? Did supplies for printing come regularly? Was her work valued?
This, she thinks, points to an attempt to draw her into treacherous, Rightist confessions. Perhaps the code in the People’s Daily is a means of examining Party members for weakness; for seeking those whose commitment is wavering. She has replied to all in the accepted style: but for the code, any official reading her responses would believe them produced by the office of propaganda itself.
She takes a sheaf of her words to the next office along. There is no electric fan in this room and the heat is stifling; the summer will be gone soon but it makes itself known for the time it is upon them, by making a soup of every room. The District Workers within smell of sweat and damp cloth. They do not look up as she enters and provides the Secondary Checking Workers with new materials; someone has placed the cut head of a flower in a bowl of water by the open window. It is covered in dust.
The test of allegiance befalls them all equally, she is sure. She may be singled out for her heritage, for her antecedents, muddy and improper, but she is absolved, temporarily, by her diligence, by her act of supreme loyalty, by her works in the Red Guard. She has burned, and burned, and burned again seditious works, swept and swept the Old Order out of the Road of Progress as Comrade Wu’s father swept and swept the filth of the streets from the footsteps of the Workers. Wind fails to stir a hair in the room.
“Crows,” says Comrade Ma, reading her words. “Should they be crows?”
“Crows are powerful,” she says.
“Crows congregate among the dead,” says Comrade Ma, troubled. “There will be questions.”
She nods. “Starlings?”
“Starlings are numerous and never act individually,” Comrade Ma agrees. She takes a brush and marks over Comrade Lin’s neat pen words. She blots out ‘Crows’. She writes ‘Starlings’. She returns the page to Comrade Lin. “Rewrite it.”
Comrade Lin accepts this criticism with thanks, and considers if any other birds might make an acceptable substitution for crows. Crows congregate among the dead: the implication of a dying Party will raise questions, and in this time, when soon they will be required to find a percentage of Rightists among their own ranks to denounce which she believes may be higher than they can reach… in this time, it is foolish to raise questions.
She returns to her own office. A chill breeze from Comrade Wu’s fan greets her like a friend; Comrade Lin recalls the curling of pages in a translated cookbook that came from India. The unfamiliar names rendered familiar in print, and sent into ashes to prevent their pollution of minds struggling towards enlightenment.
That evening she composes words in gibberish, which compile and unravel and spell out, What is a kurma and why am I not to make one?
The message is too strong. She crumples it, and tries again. The word, why, is unthinkable.
What is a kurma, what happens to books of foreign recipes in the West?
She folds the tiny slip of paper, and puts it inside the band of her cap. The word why is unthinkable, and it is Rightist, and it is to be addressed with the correct answer as soon as possible.
