Bush sat up, tore away the fine plastic skin that cocooned the bed --
it was reminiscent of a dinosaur rolling out of its damned amniote egg,
wasn't it? -- and surveyed his cubicle. A calendar-clock on the wall
gave him the dry fact of the date: Tuesday, March 31, 2093. He had not
meant to be away so long; there was always a sensation of being robbed
of life when you returned and found how time had been ticking on without
you. For the past was not the real world; it was just a dream, like the
future; it was the present only that was real, the present of passing
time which man had invented, and with which he was stuck.
Climbing out of his pack, Bush stood up and surveyed himself in the mirror.
Amid these sanitary surroundings, he looked scruffy and filthy. He fed
his measurements into the clotheomat and dialed for a one-piece. It was
delivered in thirty seconds flat; a metal drawer containing it sprang
open and caught Bush painfully on the shin. He took the garment out, laid
it on the bed, removed his wrist instruments, picked up a clean towel
from a heated rail, and padded into the shower. As he soused himself in
the warm water -- unimaginable luxury! he thought of Ann and her grubby
flesh, lost somewhere back in a time that was now transmuted into layers
of broken rock, buried underground. From now on, he would have to regard
her as just another of his casual lays; there was no reason to suppose
he would ever see her again.
In ten minutes, he was fit to leave the cubicle. He rang the bell,
and a male attendant came to unlock the door and present him with a
bill for room and services. Bush stared at the amount and winced; but
the Wenlock Institute would pay that. He would have to report there
shortly, prove that he had been doing something in the last two and a
half years. First, he would go home and be the dutiful son. Anything to
delay the report a little.
Slinging his pack over one shoulder, he walked down the spotless corridor
-- behind whose locked doors so many other escapees foraged through their
minds into the dark backward and abyss of time -- into the entrance hall.
One of his groupages was there, one of the largest, bolted onto the ceiling.
Bloody Borrow had superseded it. Forbidding himself to look up at it,
he went over towards the heat baffles and stepped into the open.
"Taxshaw, sir?"
"Going-home present, sir? Lovely little dollies!"
"Buy some flowers, mister -- daffs fresh picked today."
"Taxshaw! Take you anywhere!"
"Want a girl, squire? Take your mind off mind-travel?"
"Spare a cent!"
He remembered the cries of despair. This was home; 2090 or 2093,
this was the time track he knew. He could make a textbook picture of
it, the unfortunates ranged from left to right, like dinosaurs in
the other diagram: male beggar first, then female, then taxshawman
pulling his carriage, then toy-vendor, clouting away ragged kid, with
flower-woman extreme right, under lamp post; and, in the background,
the smart mind-station contrasted with the filthy ragged houses and
broken roads. Jostling his way through the little knot of mendicants
and hawkers, he started to walk, changed his mind, and went over to a
taxshawman sitting sullenly in his carriage. Giving his father's address,
he asked how much the ride would cost. The man told him.
"It's far too much!"
"Prices have gone up while you've been flitting round the past."
They always said that. It was always true.
Bush climbed into the vehicle, the man lifted the shafts, and they
were off.
The air tasted wonderful! It was a miracle that only this tiny sliver of
time, the present, should seem to have the magical stuff in abundance,
everywhere, even where there were no people. Clever devices though the
air-leakers were, they always made one feel near to suffocation. And
it was not only air -- there were a thousand sounds here, all striking
blessedly on Bush's ear, even the harsh ones. Also, everything that could
be seen had its individual tactile quality; everything that had been
turned to rubbery glass in the past here possessed its own miraculous
properties of texture.
Although he knew he was thoroughly hooked on mind-travel, and would
inevitably plunge back again, he loathed the abdication of the senses
it entailed. Here was the world, the real world -- rattling, blazing,
living: and probably a little too much for him, as it had proved before!
Already, as he filled his lungs, as they rattled through the streets,
he could see disturbing signs that 2093 was far from being a paradise,
perhaps even farther from being a paradise than 2090. Maybe the adage
was right that said you could stay away too long; perhaps already the
mindless reptilian past was more familiar than this present. He knew
he did not really belong here when he could not understand the slogans
scrawled on the brick walls.
At one point, a column of soldiers in double file marched down the road.
The taxshawman gave them a wide berth.
"Trouble in town?"
"Not if you keep your nose clean."
An ambiguous answer, Bush thought.
He took some while to grasp exactly why the road in which his parents lived
looked smaller, baser, altogether more drab. It was not just because several
windows had been broken and boarded up; that he recalled from before,
and the litter in the streets. It was only as he paid off the man and
confronted his father's house that he realized all the trees in the
road had been chopped down. In the dentist's neat little front garden,
two ornamental cherries had grown -- James Bush had planted them himself
when he first took over the practice -- they would have been coming into
blossom about now. As he walked up the brick path, he saw their brown
and decaying stumps sticking out of the ground like advertisements for
his father's profession.
Some things were the same. The brass plate still announced James Bush,
L.D.S., Dental Surgeon. Tucked into a transparent plastic holder, the
card still said "Please Ring and Walk In" in his mother's handwriting.
As the practice went downhill, she had been forced for economic reasons to
become her husband's receptionist, thus providing an unwitting example of
time's turning full circle, since it was as his receptionist she had got
to know him in the first place. He braced himself to hear a flood of examples
of how things had gone further downhill since he left; his mother was
always expert at providing tedious and repetitive examples of anything.
Grasping the doorknob, he Walked In without Ringing.
The hall, which was also the waiting room, was empty. Magazines and
newspapers lay about on table and chairs, notices, diagrams, and
certificates crowded the walls, rather as if this were a center for
testing literacy.
"Mother!" he called, looking up the stairs. It was gloomy up on the landing.
There was no movement.
He did not call his mother again. Instead, he tapped on the surgery door
and walked in.
His father, Jimmy Bush, James Bush, L.D.S., sat in the dental chair gazing
out into his back garden. He wore carpet slippers, and his white smock
was unbuttoned, to reveal a ragged pullover underneath. He looked round
slowly at his son, as though reluctant to regard one more human being.
"Hello, Father! It's me again -- I've just got back."
"Ted, my boy! We'd given you up! Fancy seeing you! So you've come back,
have you?"
"Yes, Father." For some situations, there were no rational forms of speech.
Jimmy Bush climbed out of the chair and shook his son's hand, grinning as
they muttered affectionately at each other. He was of the same build as
his son, a rather untidy figure. Age and habit had endowed him with a
slightly apologetic stoop, and the same hint of apology appeared in his
smile. Jimmy Bush was not a man who claimed very much for himself.
"I thought you were never coming back! This needs celebrating! I've got
a little something over here. Scotch mouthwash -- dentist's ruin."
He fumbled in a cupboard, shifted a sterilizer, and brought forth a
half-empty half-bottle of whisky.
"Know how much this costs now, Ted? Fifty pounds sixty cents, and that's
just a half bottle. It went up again at the last budget. Oh, I don't know
what things are coming to, really I don't! You know what Wordsworth said --
'The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending
we lay waste our powers.' He'd have a fit if he were alive today!"
Bush had forgotten his father's literary tags. He enjoyed them. Trying to
infuse some life into himself, he said, "I only just got back, Dad.
Haven't even reported to the Institute yet." As his father brought two
glasses out, he asked, "Is Mother in?"
Jimmy Bush hesitated, then busied himself pouring out the whisky.
"Your mother died last June, Ted. June the tenth. She'd been ill several
months. She often asked after you. Of course, we were very sorry you
weren't here, but there was nothing we could do, was there?"
"No. No, nothing. Dad, I'm sorry . . . I never . . . Was it anything bad?"
Realizing the idiocy of what he was saying, he corrected himself. "I mean,
what was the trouble?"
"The usual," Jimmy Bush said, as if his wife had often died before;
his attention was straying to his glass, which he lifted eagerly.
"Cancer, poor old girl. But it was in the bowels, and she never had a
moment's pain with it, so we must be thankful. Well, cheers anyway --
good health!"
Bush hardly knew how to respond. His mother had never been a happy woman,
but memories of some of her happy hours crowded back on him now, most
poignantly. He took a drink of the whisky. It was neat and tasted like
some sort of disinfectant, but its course down his throat was gratifying.
He accepted a mescahale when his father offered him one, and puffed
dutifully.
"I'll just have to let the news digest, Dad. I can hardly believe it!"
he said very calmly -- he couldn't let his true feelings show.
He left the drink and rushed past his father, through the little
conservatory, out to the garden. His pre-fab studio stood on the other
side of the lawn. Bush ran across to it and shut himself in.
She was dead. . . . No, she couldn't be, not while there was still so
much unfinished between them! If he'd come back punctually . . . But she
was all right when he left. He just had not imagined she, his mother,
could die. God, he'd change the damned natural laws if he could!
He raised his fist, shook it, ground his teeth. There had been too many
shocks to his ego. Dazedly, he glared about, fixing his gaze with loathing
on the Goya, "Chronos Devouring His Children." A reproduction of Turner's
"Rain, Steam and Speed" hung on another wall; that too, with its terrifying
threat of dissolution, was unbearable. On a shelf stood one of Takis's
electric sculptures, dating from the nineteen-sixties, dulled with dust,
broken, a ruin that no longer illuminated. Worse were Bush's own attempts
at expression, his canvases, sketches, montages, plastic web-sculptures,
groupages, the last SKGs he had done. All were meaningless now, a
progression without progress.
Bush set about wrecking the studio, flailing his arms, hardly aware of
his hoarse cries and sobs. The whole place seemed to fly apart.
When he came back to consciousness, he was lying back in the dentist's chair.
His father was sitting nearby, still abstractedly drinking whisky.
"How did I get here?"
"Are you okay now?"
"How did I get here?"
"You walked. Then you seemed to pass out. I hope it wasn't the whisky."
Bush could not answer that foolishness. His father had never understood him;
there was nobody to understand now.
Slowly, he pulled himself together.
"How've you managed, Father? Who's looking after you?"
"Mrs. Annivale from next door. She's very good."
"I don't remember Mrs. Annivale."
"She moved in last year. She's a widow. Husband shot in the Revolution."
"Revolution? What revolution?"
His father looked uneasily over his shoulder. Viewed through the
conservatory, the neglected garden lay empty in the April sun. Seeing no
spies there, his father was encouraged to say, "The country went bankrupt,
you know. All this expenditure on mind-travel, and no returns. . . . There
were millions of unemployed. The armed forces went over on to their side,
and the government was chucked out. It was hell here for a few months! You
were best out of the country. I was glad your mother didn't live to see
the worst of it."
Bush thought of The Amniote Egg, prospering. "The new government can't stop
mind-travel, can it?"
"Too late! Everybne's hooked on it. It's like drink, knits up the raveled
sleeve of care and all that. We've got a military government now, runs
exports and imports and so on, but the Wenlock Institute has a large share
in the government -- or so they say. I don't take any notice. I don't take
any notice of anything any more. They came to me and ordered me to work
at the barracks, looking after the soldiers' oral hygiene. I told 'em,
I've got my practice here. If your soldiers want to, they can come down
here to me, but I'm not going up there to them, and you can shoot me
before I do! They haven't bothered me again."
"What happened to the cherry trees in the front?"
"Last winter was terrible. Worst one I can ever remember! I had to chop
them down for firewood. Just out of pity, I had Mrs. Annivale in here
to live with me. She had no heating. Purely altruistic, Ted. I prefer
the bottle to sex these days, like a baby. I'm an old man, you know,
seventy-two last birthday. Besides, I'm faithful to the memory of your
mother."
"I'm sure you miss her very much."
"You know what Shelley said, 'When the lute is broken, Sweet tones
are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon
forgot.' All nonsense! Many things you take no notice of till they're
long past, many actions you don't even understand until years after they
are performed. By golly, your mother could be a bitch to me at times. She
made me suffer! You don't know!"
Bush admitted nothing.
His father continued without pause, as if following a rational train
of thought, "And one afternoon when the times were at their worst,
the troops were rioting through the city. They burnt down most of Neasden.
Mrs. Annivale came in here for protection: she was crying. Two soldiers
caught a girl up the road. I didn't know her name -- the people have
changed so much here these last few years -- I don't keep up with them
any more -- either they've got marvelous teeth or jaws full of rotten
ones, because they don't bother me much. Anyhow, she was a pretty girl,
only about twenty, and one of these soldiers dragged her up here, into the
front garden -- my front garden! -- and got her down by the wall. It was
a nice summer day and the trees were still there then. He was terribly
brutal! She struggled so, you see. He practically tore every shred of
clothes off her. Mrs. Annivale and I watched it all from the waiting
room window."