infinities (12 page)

And to a great extent it had worked – I knew that at first hand. Even to this day, whatever the evidence of my senses or my intellect, I know deep inside me that World War II was fought in black-and-white and that the winners were those slightly comical chappies with their strangled accents. At the time I was sitting on the train home and these notions were formulating themselves in my head, the knowledge was much stronger. Ever since I'd started going to the Monday matinees I'd been having those occasional but powerful flashes when the world around me seemed to be nothing but a charade, the powerful feeling that true reality was what I saw on the Rupolo's screen. Were my own experience to be repeated all over America or all over the world, to be shared by millions upon millions of others, then assuredly the consensus perception of which railway line the train had pounded along might change.

And the past with it.

The only reason the ploy had ultimately failed in my own instance was that I had begun to think of the movies analytically – it had been my conscious decision to continue watching them, but now on the basis that they were thrillingly
verboten
presentations. Had I continued to watch them uncritically, seeing them through the lens of my emotions rather than that of my intellect, I might have eventually come to see the world they depicted as the only possible past, the true history. No wonder the other Monday regulars at the Rupolo hadn't seemed disappointed by
Private Kohl's War
and
The Rising Sun Shall Never Set
. While I'd been watching those two ditchwater outings the rest of the audience had been watching something else –
The Fall of Berlin
, perhaps, or
Convoy to Nairobi
, or ... They'd seen those movies because there was no reason for them not to. I, on the other hand, had been able to see only movies that accorded with my own particular perception of the way the past had run. Along the railway track to which my perception was once more limited, the victors had made the movies that reinforced the consensual past.

~

Whoever those conspirators were – if they even existed outside the bounds of my own fertile imagination – their scheme patently failed, and not because of the cops busting cinemas like the Rupolo all over the country but because in due course no human being can continue to observe and accept outside stimuli completely uncritically: eventually, as with myself, the analytical faculty must step in to limit the scope of the mind. For me to say that this self-limiting mechanism of the brain is a tragedy might seem rather rich, coming as that statement does from someone who has made a lifetime career – and a very great deal of money – out of deploying that very same analytical faculty. Yet I stick to the contention. Without a full perception of the true, complicated nature of our past we are not fully prepared as a species to tackle the equally complicated, multiply braided future that awaits us. We will forever be blind to the flowering of the simultaneous realities of our own future, instead perceiving only a single stalk, permitting ourselves to glance neither to left nor to right as we charge ahead oblivious to the splendors all around us. It is a sterile course we are following, this faith in our perception that there is only a single, unique future, and I believe that in due course it will lead to our extinction. If there are other species out there among the stars, I have no doubt they will have learned not to make the same mistake we've made and persist in making, and that they'll thereby be equipped to deal with the future: to welcome it as the burgeoning treasure-store it is in a way we are not. Perhaps only here, on this world, has the mistake ever been made.

As for the movies themselves? As I've said, I am a rich man, and I've spent some of my wealth on employing researchers to try to track down those whose titles I can recall:
Albert RN
,
The Great Escape
,
Reach for the Sky
,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
... But so far they've come up with nothing, and I doubt that now this will ever change. What I still think of as The Rupolo Movies were, if you like, just temporary visitors to our consensual and ever-evolving history; whether they'll ever come back – or be brought back – is something about which one can't guess. My suspicion is that we've seen the last of them.

Every now and then I wonder what our consensual present would be like had we indeed been able to perceive a railway track along which one of the stations was the Allies winning World War II. Would things be so very much different? Would they be better or would they be worse? Again, who can guess?

This particular version of history has been very good to me. I've led an extremely comfortable life doing more or less exactly what I wanted to do, indulging my own especial passion and being paid large sums of money simply to enjoy myself. And most of the time, as I look around at the rest of the world, everything there seems pretty near ideal as well. But sometimes I wonder.

This week in the
New York Times
there was much reporting of the bloody suppression of yet another escape plot by the niggers in one of the slave camps of the South. Scores of them were shot or hanged, including children, and the ringleaders were roasted alive, as is the custom there. I am not one of those who would pretend that the niggers are anything other than a debased subspecies of humanity, but at the same time I cannot believe that this is right: I would not roast a dog or a cat alive, so how can it be right to do this to a nigger? The week before, two homosexuals were lynched in Massachusetts; that was considered to be such a routine occurrence that the story was given only a single paragraph tucked away at the bottom of page twelve. Again, can it be truly right to punish someone with death for their sexual preferences? To be sure, the law would have delivered them a jail sentence, which is certainly justified enough, but the tone of that single paragraph seemed to condone the actions of the lynch mob. I feel uneasy at the ease and frequency with which our penal system carries out executions, often of people who seem to me to be more mentally ill or impaired, or simply more independently minded, than genuinely criminal. And I wish that when vagrants are rounded up they did not simply disappear.

So, yes, sometimes I wonder.

Copyright information
© John Grant, 2002, 2011
"Wooden Horse" was first published in
The Third Alternative
in 2002, and is reprinted in the infinity plus ebook
Take No Prisoners
by John Grant:

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It's the mid-1990s and Nick Redpath has some issues to resolve. Like why he is relentlessly drawn back to a circle of old friends and enemies – and an old love – in his seaside birthplace in north Essex. And why he won't let himself fall in love again. But first he must prove that he didn't murder his old flame, Geraldine Wyse...

Kaitlin Queen is the adult fiction pen-name of a best-selling children's author. Kaitlin also writes for national newspapers and websites. Born in Essex, she moved to Northumberland when she was ten and has lived there ever since. This is her first crime novel for an adult audience.

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One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death.

—Thomas Hood,
The Bridge of Sighs
, 1844

He had to get going. He had to
move
.

Sitting at the wheel of his old VW Golf, Nick Redpath tried to pull himself together.

He had to go for help.

To guide him he only had Betsy's vague instructions and his own sepia-tinted memories. It might be a long drive, he thought.

"There's a public house," Betsy had said. His wife insisted he should be called Marcus now, but he'd always been Betsy at school. "Just across the level crossing. Head towards the Ipswich Road. What's it called? Caroline? The name?"

Betsy had drunk a lot this evening and it was clearly a great effort for him to think straight. Even the shock hadn't sobered him up.

"Does it matter, Marcus?" Caroline snapped. "There's a pub. It'll have a telephone."

Nick left them arguing on the uneven wooden deck of the chalet. They'd be divorced in a year, he was certain of that: they'd been at each other's throats all evening.

A soft murmur of voices came from the next chalet. Trevor Carr was in there, comforting his girlfriend. Mandy's response had been erratic: one minute calm and rational, the next verging towards hysteria.

As Nick reached the parking area at the back Ronnie Deller appeared out of the night, still belligerent with drink. "I'm going," Ronnie said. "It's my place. I'm ... responsible."

"Come on, Ronnie," said Nick. He felt tired. He just wanted it all to be out of his hands, but not if that meant passing it on to Ronnie. "We decided," he said. "Will you let me through?" They'd all been drinking and at least Ronnie had been smoking dope. As Nick was the most sober it had been agreed that he should go and make the call while the others stayed together at the Strand.

For once Ronnie backed down, slouching away into the darkness. Before Nick had managed to start the engine, he heard him arguing loudly with Caroline Betts.

Alone with the night at last, Nick felt strangely secure in his old car. He felt that he might just slide down into the seat, wrap his arms around himself and try to forget. The temptation was strong.

He had to get going. He shook his head, slapped his face sharply. Once, twice.

Things seemed a little clearer now. Carefully, he set off, up Strand Lane with the Stour estuary spreading out behind him, all mud and water and drifts of sea-purslane.

It was mid-September, but the air was still peppered with bats and moths, sudden flashes of white in the full beam of the headlights. A long time ago he might have had names for them. Were those little bats called something like Pepperoni? Pipistrani? Pipistrelle?

He slapped his face again and then snatched at the wheel before the hedge could intervene. His mind was wandering. He had to pull himself together.

The lane could only be half a mile long, but it seemed to be taking forever, first surrounded by trees, now with open fields to either side.

Eventually, he came to the level crossing. There would be no trains at this time of night. Not even a late boat-train heading for an overnight sailing to the Hook.

He drove on and soon afterwards he came to a T-junction. Remembering Betsy's instructions, he turned right, and as he rounded the first corner he spotted the pub. It was called the Plough. A single bulb illuminated the sign. Other than that the place was in complete darkness.

He checked his watch. One-thirty.

He pulled up in the car park, convinced that he would be out of luck: the telephone would be inside, locked up. Maybe he could rouse someone to help, but there was something about the place, with its shabby white stucco walls and peeling paint, that told him he'd be wasting his time.

Betsy had been right, though. There was a call box—old-fashioned, red—tucked away by the road. To beat back the darkness Nick parked with his headlamps directed full into the box.

For a moment before he entered he froze in the twin beam, like a rabbit on a road. Inside, his body cut out most of the light and his eyes had trouble adjusting, but he could have made the call blindfold in any case.