Authors: Anthony Burgess
After six or seven unheeded thumb-jerks, just as he was about to start walking, an army lorry squeal-ground to a halt by him. ‘Wigan,’ said the soldier-driver, ‘with this here lot behind.’ He gave his head a savage jolt towards the rear in indication. Tristram’s heart bounded. Twenty miles north of Wigan lay Preston. Three miles west of Preston, on the Blackpool road, lay State Farm NW
313
. He climbed aboard, full of thanks. ‘Well,’ said the driver, his hands gripping the big wheel at a diameter’s span, ‘I reckon it won’t be all that long now then, mister.’
‘No,’ agreed Tristram fervently.
‘Tell me, then, mister,’ said the driver. ‘Who do you think it’s going to be?’ He sucked loudly at a natural pre-molar, a youngish fattish fair man with a greasy cap.
‘Eh?’ said Tristram. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t – I was thinking of something else, I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid,’
repeated the driver in satisfaction. ‘That’s just about it, isn’t it? That’s the word. There’s a lot going to be afraid before long, mister, you among them, I dare say. But it stands to reason you’ve got to have a war. Not because anybody wants it, of course, but because there’s an army. An army here and an army there and armies all over the shop. Armies is for wars and wars is for armies. That’s only plain common sense.’
‘War’s finished,’ said Tristram. ‘War’s outlawed. There hasn’t been any war for years and years and years.’
‘All the more reason why there’s got to be a war,’ said the driver, ‘if we’ve been such a long time without one.’
‘But,’ said Tristram, agitated, ‘you’ve no conception what war was like. I’ve read books about the old wars. They were terrible, terrible. There were poison gases that turned your blood to water and bacteria that killed the seed of whole nations and bombs that smashed cities in a split second. All that’s over. It’s got to be over. We can’t have all that again. I’ve seen photographs,’ he shivered. ‘Films, too. Those old wars were ghastly. Rape, looting, torture, arson, syphilis. Unthinkable. No, no, never again. Don’t say things like that.’
The driver, tilting his wheel gently, his shoulders jigging like a bad dancer’s, sucked hard. ‘I didn’t mean that sort, mister. I meant, you know, fighting. Armies. One lot having a bash at another lot, if you see what I mean. One army facing another army, like it might be two teams. And then one lot shoots at another lot, and they go on shooting till somebody blows the whistle and they say, “This lot’s won and this lot’s lost.” Then they dish out leave and medals and the tarts are all lined up waiting at the station. That’s the sort of war I mean, mister.’
‘But who,’ asked Tristram, ‘would go to war with whom?’
‘Well,’ said the driver, ‘that would have to be sorted out, wouldn’t it? Arrangements would sort of have to be made, wouldn’t they? But, you mark my words, it’s got to come.’ The cargo behind him danced tinnily, jauntily, as they went over a hump bridge. ‘A hero’s death,’ said the soldier suddenly with a sort of complacency. The battalion of tinned meat jingled applause, like some giant chestful of medals.
Nine
T
RISTRAM
got a lift in a Military Police van from Wigan to Standish, then the road was suddenly empty of traffic. He walked slowly and with some difficulty through the plenilunar night, his left foot giving him trouble – a thick seg and the shoe-sole worn to a neat hole. Still, he shogged along bravely, with quiet excitement trotting in front of him, its tongue out, and the night shogged with him towards morning. His feet suggested a rest at Leyland, but his heart would have none of that. On to dawn in Preston: a breather there, perhaps an eleemosynary breakfast, then on to his goal, three miles west. Morning and the town approached stealthily.
What was that ringing noise? Frowning, Tristram poked his little fingers into his ears, agitating the wax with a deafening rumble. He automatically sniffed at the waxy finger-tip (the only pleasant odour of all that the body secreted), listening. That bell-noise came from the world, not his head: it clanged out of the town itself. Bells to welcome the pilgrim in? Nonsense. It was not bells, either: it was an electronic fabrication of bells – slow-pulsing from shaking loudspeakers, throwing up a metallic spray of harmonics, demented silver. Wondering, Tristram approached. He entered Preston in full morning and was swallowed by crowds and the jubilant clanging, crying to the strangers who surrounded him, ‘What is all this? What’s going on?’ They laughed in answer, deaf, dumb, mouthing in the mad swirl of auricular metal. A shuddering bronze lid, which miraculously
seemed to let in more light, had come down in silver over the township. People were moving towards the source of the mad angelic din; Tristram followed. It was like entering the very heart of noise, noise as ultimate reality.
A grey freestone anonymous building – provincial architecture, no more than ten storeys – and loudspeakers flaring down from its roof. Tristram entered, jostled, out of the lemon sunlight, and inside the building opened his mouth at the vast cubic hollowness. Never in his life had he seen an interior so large. It could not be called a room – a hall, meeting-place, place of assembly; there must be a special word and he searched for it. It was an improvisation: the cells of the old block (flats or offices) had been shelled out; roomwalls had been knocked down, as jagged brick buttresses showed; the floor-ceilings of several storeys cleared, stripped, so that the eyes were shocked at the height. Tristram recognized an altar on a rostrum at the far end; rows of rough benches, people sitting waiting, kneeling praying. The appropriate terms began to creak back from his reading, as
platoon, battalion
had come back before in a context that, for some reason, seemed similar.
Church. Congregation
. ‘You’re oldin oop traffic, lad,’ said a genial voice behind. Tristram took a, took a – what was the word? Took a
pew
.
Priests, a plurality of them, marched burlily in with big fat candles, a platoon (no, a section) of boy-servitors.
‘lntroibo ad altare Dei –’
Mixed voices, a whole storey up, in a gallery at the rear of the building, replied in song:
‘Ad Deum Qui laetificat juventutem meam.’
This was some very special occasion. This was like playing chess
with carved ivory horses and elephants, not with bits of shaped prison soap.
“Alleluia”
kept crashing into the liturgy. Tristram waited patiently for the Consecration, the eucharistic breakfast, but the grace before meat was very long.
A heavy-lipped bull of a priest turned from the altar to the congregation, standing at the rostrum’s edge, blessing the air. ‘Brethren,’ he said. A speech, an oration, an address, a
sermon
. ‘This is Easter Day. This morning we celebrate the resurrection or rising-from-the-dead of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Crucified for preaching the kingdom of God and brotherhood of man, His dead weight dragged down from the cross and stamped in the earth – as weed is stamped or fire-ash – He yet rose on the third day in raiment glorious as the sun and moon and all the fires of the firmament. He rose to bear witness to the world that there is no death, that death is but appearance and not reality, that the seeming forces of death are but shadows and their prevalence but a prevalence of shadows.’ The priest belched gently on a fasting stomach. ‘He rose to extol life everlasting, not a whitelipped ghost-life in some tenebrose noosphere –’ (‘Ee,’ said a woman behind Tristram) ‘– but a totality or unity of life in which the planets dance with the amrebre, the great unknown macrobes with the microbes that swirl in our bodies and the bodies of the beasts our fellows, all flesh is one and flesh is also corn, grass, barley. He is the sign, the eternal symbol, the perpetual recurrence made flesh; He is man, beast, corn, God. His blood also becomes our blood through its act of refreshing our sluggish warm red, coiling along its palpitating channels. His blood is not only the blood of man, beast, bird,
fish; it is also the rain, the river, the sea. It is the ecstatically pumped seed of men and it is the flowing richness of the milk of the mothers of men. In Him we become one with all things, and He is one with all things and with us.
‘Today in England, today throughout the English-Speaking Union, we joyfully celebrate, with sackbut and psaltery and loud alleluias, the resurrection of the Prince of Life. Today, too, in far lands which in the barren past rejected the flesh and the blood of the Eternal Lifegiver, this His rising from the tomb is hailed with a joy like to our own, though under figures and names of outlandish meaning and heathenish sound.’ The man to Tristram’s right frowned at that sentence. ‘For, though we call Him Jesus and the veritable Christ, yet is He beyond all names and above them, so that Christ re-arisen will hear Himself addressed in joy and worship as Thammuz or Adonis or Attis or Balder or Hiawatha, and to Him all is one as all names are one, as all words are one, as all life is one.’ The preacher was silent for a space; spring coughs hacked out from the congregation. Then, with the irrelevance proper to a religious discourse, he cried with a main voice, ‘Therefore, fear not. In the midst of death we are in life.’
‘Aaaargh, bloody nonsense!’ called a voice from the rear. ‘You can’t bring the dead back, blast you, for all your fine talk!’ Heads swivelled gratefully; there was a scuffle; arms flailed; Tristram could not see very well.
‘I think,’ said the preacher, unperturbed, ‘it would be better if my interrupter left. If he will not leave voluntarily perhaps he could be assisted to leave.’
‘Bloody nonsense! Whoring after false gods, God forgive
your black heart!’ And now Tristram could see who it was. He knew that moon-face, red with generous anger. ‘My own children,’ it yelled, ‘sacrificed on the altar of Baal that you worship as the true God, God forgive you!’ The big body, in its sack farmer’s garments, was being pulled out fighting by struggling panting men, leaving the presence correctly backwards, its arms pinned painfully behind it. ‘God forgive the lot of you, for I never shall!’
‘Excuse me,’ murmured Tristram, pushing out of his pew. Somebody had placed a gagging hand over his brother-in-law’s retreating mouth. ‘Bob,’ came the muffled protest. ‘Bob blasp be bop ob boo.’ Shonny and his rough hard-breathing escort were already through the doorway. Tristram walked fast up the aisle. ‘To resume,’ the preacher resumed.
Ten
‘So,’ said Tristram hopelessly, ‘they just took her away.’
‘And then,’ said Shonny dully, ‘we waited and waited, but they didn’t come home. And then the next day we knew what had happened. Oh, God, God.’ He made a big red plate of his hands and plopped the pudding of his head on to it, sobbing.
‘Yes, yes, terrible,’ said Tristram. ‘Did they say where they were taking her to? Did they say they were going back to London?’
‘I blame myself,’ said Shonny’s hidden head. ‘I trusted
God. It was the wrong God I was trusting, all these long years. No God who was good could let that happen, God forgive Him.’
‘All for nothing,’ sighed Tristram. ‘All that journey wasted.’ His hand trembled round his glass. They were seated in a small shop that sold water barely touched by alc.
‘Mavis has been wonderful,’ said Shonny, looking up, dripping with tears. ‘Mavis took it like a saint or an angel. But I’ll never be the same again, never. I tried telling myself that God knew why it had happened, that there was a divine reason for everything. I even came to mass this morning, ready to be like Job and to praise the Lord in the transport of my miseries. And then I saw. I saw it in that priest’s fat face; I heard it in his fat voice. A false God has taken possession of them all.’ He breathed in hard with a curious rattling noise like sea-dragged shingle. The few other drinkers (men in old clothes, not celebrating Easter) looked up.
‘You can have other children,’ said Tristram. ‘You still have your wife, your home, your work, your health. But what am I to do? Where can I go, who can I turn to?’
Shonny glared at him evilly. There was scum round his lips and his chin was ill-shaven. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ he said. ‘You with your children that I’ve protected all these months at the risk of the lives of my whole family. You and your sly twins.’
‘Twins?’ Tristram stared. ‘Twins, did you say?’
‘With these hands,’ said Shonny, and he presented them to the world, huge and hooked, ‘I brought your twins to birth. And now I say: Better if I hadn’t. Better
if I’d let them shift for themselves, like little wild animals. Better if I’d strangled them and given them to your false greedy God with His lips dripping with blood, picking His teeth after His favourite accursed meal of little children. Then, perhaps, He would have left mine alone. Then, perhaps, He would have permitted them to come home from school unmolested, as on any other day, and let them live. Live,’ he shouted. ‘Live, live, live.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tristram. ‘You know I’m sorry.’ He paused. ‘Twins,’ he said in wonder. And then, vigorously, ‘Where did they say they were going? Did they say they were going back to my brother in London?’
‘Yes, yes, yes, I suppose so. I suppose they said something like that. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Nothing matters any more.’ He sucked at his glass without relish. ‘My whole world’s shattered,’ he said. ‘I have to build it up again, searching for a God I can believe in.’
‘Oh,’ cried Tristram in sudden irritation, ‘don’t be so sorry for yourself. It’s people like you who’ve made the kind of world you say you no longer believe in. We were all safe enough in that old liberal society.’ He was talking of less than a year back. ‘Hungry, but safe. Once you kill the liberal society you create a vacuum for God to rush into, and then you unleash murder and fornication and cannibalism. And,’ said Tristram, his heart suddenly sinking, ‘you believe it’s right for man to go on sinning for ever, because that way you justify your. belief in Jesus Christ,’ for he saw that whatever government was in power he would always be against it.
‘That’s not right,’ said Shonny, with surprising reasonableness. ‘Not it at all. There are two Gods, you see.
They get mixed up, and it’s hard for us to find the right one. Like,’ he said, ‘those twins, Derek and Tristram she called them. She got them mixed up when they were naked. But it’s better to have it that way than to have no God at all.’