1985 (33 page)

‘Take him down,' bawled the clerk of the court to Bev's police attendant.

He had not done too badly really, thought Bev as he travelled north in a closed van, a white-coated orderly beside him, a conducting officer
in grey next to the driver. It was spring now, very nearly Shakespeare's birthday, and he had lived free, though dirty, for nearly the whole of a hardish winter. He had not given in to the swine. As for now, was he really beaten? Hardly, since he remained unsyndicalized despite all their entreaties and bludgeonings. He could live freely in the large periphery of his brain. He knew precisely what was going to happen to him.

‘Here it is,' said the orderly. ‘SI-5, Purfleet Castle as was. Hear them birds sing, see that lovely green and them daffodils,' for the van door was now open. ‘Consider yourself bleeding lucky to be here and not in the bleeding jug.'

‘Anybody's free to enter,' said Bev, ‘so long as they see sense.'

‘Shut your fag-hole,' said the conducting officer. ‘Get out there and get in.'

Bev was handed over by the white-coated orderly to a couple of men in cleaner white coats. They had clipboards and the frowns of the overworked. Bev was sent in for a physical check-up.

‘Go on, bend down proper. We've got to see right up. That's more like it.'

Undernourished, underweight, physical tone poor, right lung somewhat spotted, heart to be watched, teeth dreadful, in dire need of a bath.

A clean Bev in an institutional dressing-gown had his mind gone over by a Dr Schimmel and a Dr Kilburn, the latter a woman, washed-out blonde, thin and sharp. He tried to get the matrix tests wrong, but his wrongness was so consistent as to be adjudged right. Dr Schimmel said: ‘What's the matter with you, man? You could live a sane healthy productive life if you wanted to.'

‘I know. But that would mean approving of an insane morbid slothful State philosophy.'

‘That's undemocratic. Insanity is defined as a rejection of the majority ethos. You proclaim insanity in words and actions.' Both doctors frowned over the thick dossier that had accompanied Bev on his journey.

‘What are you going to do to me?' asked Bev. They did not answer. Bev said: ‘Look, I can't see where I've gone wrong. I was brought up under a system of government that was regarded as the triumph of centuries of instinctual sanity. I see the world changed. Am I obliged to change with it?' Both looked at him in quiet satisfaction, as though the
asking of that question was a kind of capsule confirmation of his insanity. Dr Kilburn said:

‘You're part of it. Your error is in supposing that the human observer can be separated from the things observed. Your aberration, to use a charitable term, is that you resist change.'

‘I won't resist the change that brings the world back to sanity. To an acceptance of justice and the wholesomeness of spiritual and aesthetic ideals.'

‘Yes?' said Dr Schimmel encouragingly.

‘Consider,' said Bev, ‘the British Constitution. I believe that the people should be represented, as they have been for centuries. All we have now is an upper house legislature crammed with TUC life peers. The House of Commons is withering away. The monarch, as head of the executive, presides over a cabinet made up of alumni of the TUC Political College. The elective principle has disappeared.'

‘The people,' said Dr Schimmel, ‘elect their union representatives. Isn't that fair enough?'

‘No,' said Bev, ‘for life is more than what nowadays passes for work. More than a fair wage and a dwindling selection of ill-made useless consumer goods to spend it on. Life is beauty, truth, spiritual endeavour, ideals, eccentricity –'

‘Ah,' said both doctors.

Bev felt very tired. ‘It won't do, it won't, it won't, it won't.' And then: ‘Forget it. It's like addressing a couple of brick walls. Do what has to be done. I'm in your hands.'

Don't let them get away with it
. The man who slept in the next bed, formerly a professional signwriter, made a beautiful job of inscribing those words in Gothic letters (upper and lower case) on a panel cut from a shirt-box lid (institutional shirts, grey, medium, 10). This had, with permission from the wardmaster, been affixed with tacks to the wall above Bev's bedside locker. Nobody enquired as to what the words signified: they were taken as an emblem of Bev's derangement.

The food was plain and adequate. There were football or cricket matches in the ample grounds. There was even a library made up of books that had escaped liquidation in the State taking over of ancient aristocratic country seats. Volumes of seventeenth-century sermons, Thomson's
The Seasons
, Pope, Cowper,
The Rights of Man
, John Milton, nothing later than about 1789.

Don't let them get away with it
. Don't let who get away with what?

They rarely bothered with news of the outside world. Mr Thresher, who had been a television news reader given, in his later (literally) days, to ribald asides on the items he retailed, kept his hand pathetically in by announcing in the day-room public occurrences that might or might not be fictitious:

‘British inflation is running at the rate of fifty-five per cent per annum. This was stated unofficially by Dr Erlanger, World Bank economic adviser, at a conference in Chicago of United States economists. The figure was neither denied nor confirmed by the Tucland authorities.' Or:

‘The National Union of Comprehensive School Students has reached an amicable settlement with the National Union of Teachers as regards the relegation of schoolteachers to an advisory capacity in the conduct of State education. The help of the teachers in devising school syllabuses of a more realistic content than has hitherto prevailed will be gladly accepted, said Ted Soames, National Secretary of NUCST, at a press conference, but students will consider themselves under no obligation to implement the advice given –'

‘Ah, shut it,' Mr Cauldwell, a boilermaker, would shout, looking up from his game of checkers with Mr Toomey, a ruined cobbler.

‘– Among projected school courses at the secondary level may be mentioned sex drill, porn hard and soft, strip-cartoon teaching of trade union history –'

‘Shut it, or I'll bleeding bash you.'

But Mr Cauldwell was frightened of Mr Ricordi, a thin frail man who had run a bookshop and was believed to have the Evil Eye. Mr Ricordi would turn it on him, and Mr Cauldwell would gulp and go back to his slow game. Or:

‘The Islamicization of the Isle of Man, or Gazira-ul-Ragul, has, thanks to the fervour of Nabi Mohamed Saleh bin Abdullah, formerly Joseph Briggs, been effected with comparative smoothness. Protests at the imposition on the community of total abstinence from alcoholic liquors were to be expected, but scientific demonstrations of the absence of alcohol in Manx beer, the stimulant-depressant LMP having been long substituted for it, convinced the community that no real hardship was being imposed.'

‘Shut it shut it, or you'll get my fucking fist in your fucking face,'
Mr Ricordi having gone out for a moment.
Don't let them get away with it
.

They wouldn't get away with it, not indefinitely. They couldn't. You can't take without at the same time giving. Bev was prepared to get out there and fight again, preach, get his own army together. Was this a sign of dementia? The only way he could get out was to have his family claim him. That meant Bessie. He got a letter to Bessie, sending it through the London agents of the Arab ruler who was his son-in-law, potential or actual, or else merely the man who had debauched, and was perhaps intermittently still debauching, his daughter. Six months later he got a postcard, its glossy picture showing camels and street beggars: ‘der dad i am alrit ere tely very gud i am ok luv besi.' The next letter he wrote received the following reply:

Dear Sir,

I am directed to inform you that no one of the name of Elizabeth (Bessie) Jones is resident in any of His Highness's establishments. Conceivably you are mistaken as to either the name or the address, perhaps both.

Yours very truly. . . .

From the Astana, Ghadan, the 12th day of the month Shaaban, in the year of the Hijrah, 1364.

Mr Coombes, a Jehovah's Witness, tried to escape. He was powerfully reminded that he was undergoing an indefinite period of penal servitude. The perimeter wires were electrified. The institution had its own generators; there was no hope of their being rendered harmless through a strike. Mr Coombes, a tough man in his late fifties, was badly burnt. One of the medical officers told him he was lucky he had a strong heart. There were also big dogs which Bev could hear howling sometimes in the night. Presumably the supervision of the inmates could be left to these animals if the human staff were to go on strike. Dogs had, as yet, no union. Anyway, the human staff had it cushy and showed no desire to withdraw what was euphemistically termed their labour.

The long days that grew into months and years were enlivened by the deaths of the older inmates and, very occasionally, the entrusting of some of them to the care of their families: farewell tea parties, with an extra
cake each. New inmates brought news of the outside world; the news did not greatly interest such veterans as Bev. One day none other than Colonel Lawrence appeared. He had been convicted of manslaughter. Discharged from his army, he had found work as a State interpreter, under his real name of Charles Ross. Frustrated for one reason or another, he had broken a habit of abstinence that had lasted a quarter of a century, and, drunk in a pub, had quarrelled with a Persian. He had not intended to kill the Persian, he said; the skull of his victim had, at the autopsy, been shown to be preternaturally fragile. Anyway, here he was.

The Persians, he said, were going to go to war with the Arabs. The Islamic union had been broken. The Iranians were Aryan and the Arabs Semitic, and blood was thicker than a Koranic
surah.
The Shah, whom the Americans had long considered to be the only reliable magnate of the Middle East, was well armed with what the Pentagon called a nuclear capability. The Arabs, who had never been favoured customers of the American armourers, would be at the mercy of Iran. Iran would take over all the oilfields of the Middle East. The Arabs, aware of American partiality to Iran, were withdrawing their megadollars from the American banks. There was bank panic in the United States, with little depositors lining up for cash and finding their local banks declaring a moratorium. The Federal Reserve was printing too much money, desirous of quelling the panic by increasing – in fact, doubling – the cash flow. Too much cash in the United States. Twice the amount of cash chasing the same quantity of consumer goods. Stores closing down, their shelves emptied, an awareness among the economically literate that inflation was spreading like a southern Californian fire. Other currencies responding to dollar inflation. The sterling situation unbelievable. Bankruptcy on its way. The end of syndicalism? At least three and a half million unemployed in Tucland. Nothing much heard of Mr Pettigrew these days. Deposed? Assassinated? A burly man called Big Tim Holloway heard much in the land, ranting about workers' unity and the wicked capitalists.

Bev had taken to teaching history to a small interested group, giving a lesson on Elizabethan England every afternoon in one of the day-rooms. Later he gave a course on England in the seventeenth century. It seemed reasonable to push on to the end, all from a memory that grew ever more defective. He seemed, even to himself, to be dealing with the history of another planet. But he and his students escaped daily to this unreal past, as to a fuggy room from a biting wind. The First World War,
recovery, Wall Street crash, rearmament, the rise of totalitarianism. The Second World War and after. History dangerously began to approach the present. The present could not be summarized, explained, even well understood. A great river seemed inexplicably to be dissipating itself into a vast number of muddy little streams and creeks. One afternoon he sat hopelessly in front of his class – Mr Tyburn, Mr Gresham, Mr Hooker, Mr Merlin, Mr Lyly, others. He said:

‘Shall we start again? Shall we go back to the rise of capitalism and try once more to trace the cracks in the structure, to discover where everything began to go wrong?' Mr Hooker said:

‘I think we've had enough.'

Bev nodded and nodded. After supper that night he went out into the grounds. That heart was weak, watch that heart. He stumbled through the unknown pasque-grass to that part of the electrified perimeter that was framed by two knotty apple trees. Those trees had given sour crabs for a long time. They would survive a while, and that was a small comfort. The moon, defiled by politics, its poetry long drowned in the Sea of Storms, had but recently risen. Bev addressed to it certain meaningless words.

But, of course, they all got away with it; they always would. History was a record of the long slow trek from Eden towards the land of Nod, with nothing but the deserts of injustice on the way. Nod. Nod off. Sleep. He nodded a farewell to the moon. Then he bared his flesh-less breast to the terrible pain of the electrified fence, puzzling an instant about why you had to resign from the union of the living in order to join the strike of the dead. He then felt his heart jump out of his mouth and tumble among the windfalls.

Worker's English represents the rationalization of a general pattern of proletarian language, formulated by Dr R. Stafford and Dr A.S. McNab, of the Ministry of Education, during the 1970s, and made compulsory as a subject and as a medium of instruction in State schools, under the provisions of the Democratization of Language Act, 1981. The basis of the language is the urban workers' speech of the Home Counties, with a few additions from the industrial Midlands and North-West, but with very few elements of rural dialect. The primary aim of Drs Stafford and McNab was less the imposition, under political or syndicalist pressure, of the language of the dominant social class on the rest of the community than the adaptation of an existing form of English to the fulfilment of a traditional language planner's aspiration – namely, the development of a rational kind of language, in which grammar should be simplified to the maximum and vocabulary should achieve the limitations appropriate to a non-humanistic highly industrialised society. What appeared, in fact, to be the implementation of part of a political programme was actually a social achievement with no political bias, with the two philologists concerned activated by a scientific desire for the reduction of entities and only secondary ambitions in the fields of class domination and pedagogic economy.