Inner Circle

By the same author

THE KNOTTED CORD

LOOT AND LOYALTY

FUTURE TO LET

ISOLATION

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

THAT ANGEL BURNING AT MY LEFT SIDE

© Jerzy Peterkiewicz 1966

MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED

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Contents

Book One

Surface 1

Underground 27

Sky 49

Book Two

Surface 65

Underground 83

Sky 107

Book Three

Surface 129

Underground 148

Sky 168

Book One

Surface

1

Our neighbour has a turret of a neck, long, sinewy and vigilant. This might be useful for picking up information, but we have to squash him against the box whenever we go round. For the circle must stay as it is, unbroken. Sometimes he clings to the hook on my belt and trails behind me for a minute, then he bumps into another cluster of people, lets the belt go, and bounces back to the box.

‘We’re well looked after though, aren’t we?’ he keeps assuring himself into my ear as it passes close to his mouth. He probably means the hygiene box: his back touches it, rubs, rebounds and leans against it; could he but turn his whole body instead of craning his neck, the indoor pleasures would be his without queueing. He can’t, because the crowd tends to coagulate near a box or a firmly linked circle like ours. That’s why the five of us cannot risk standing still for long. The others might push right through us. It’s safer to revolve. And a small space inside the circle will remain free and empty as long as we protect it with this turning human hoop.

A moment ago our neighbour pointed his turret of a neck at our patch of ground and seemed to be measuring it up from his eye-level.

‘You’ll have to tilt your heads,’ he said, ‘when the rain comes tilt them well back.

Like this.’

He expected at least one of us to look up and see what his neck was capable of.

This is how he often tries to attract attention. My first wife happens to be called Rain.

Now she smiled at the sound of her name. But she knew as well as I did that the real rain was very rarely allowed to pass through the openings in the adjustable sky above the millions of heads like ours, which were at this moment bending, tilting, swaying, nodding and eyeing one another all over this jewel island set in the sea we couldn’t enter, cross or watch from the air. Precious indeed was the jewel, and hard, and bare.

‘If you make a hollow in the earth the size of a fist, like this, look’—came another piece of neighbourly advice—’if you do this at night, moisture will collect inside, and then things might grow.’

Things: we all searched for things under our moving feet, anything roundish and black that could be a seed, or some bit of a twig, or just a splinter. The night before, I had wedged one in and it looked like a morsel of weed; my foot gnashed on the gravel, perhaps the thing went too deep or slid to the side. It wasn’t worth telling the others.

‘What’s your name?’ This time I craned my neck to show him that mine too, though much shorter than his, could be quick and inquisitive. ‘Your name?’ I almost shouted. Clinging types, especially in crowds near the hygiene boxes, were put off when you asked for their particulars. Not that we went much by names. My second wife, for instance, was September. There were thousands of Septembers whirling about in this area between the Kent coast and the dried-up marshes of London. And the month of September apparently kept returning each year, though as a rule we didn’t bother about the seasons and the months that were supposed to belong to them. The man was slow in replying: perhaps he had vacated his precious post altogether. No, there he stood, holding his breath for the approach of my ear.

‘We met in Leeds, don’t you remember’ He wasn’t put off, merely offended.

‘And your own name I know, sounded something like Cliff or White?’

‘No, Dover.’

‘Dover! But of course! We met in Leeds, you see. You had no wives then, I distinctly remember. You said you had lost one that could have been a wife, when that big stampede started. You remember the stampede at Leeds, I bet you do.’

‘Oh, that—’

I did remember it, but I wished he wouldn’t, like the rest of them, use those stupid old place-names which in fact signified next to nothing. The sand, the clay, the stones we were milling and wearing out with our feet, year by year, second by second, looked from our habitual eye-angle very much the same, whether the encircled ground happened to be within the imaginary boundaries of something once called London or Leeds or Llandudno. No streets, no vehicles, no plants, nothing that barked, miaowed or bleated.

My knowledge of traditional geography was no worse than his. The fool was very likely named after Leeds. The necky Mr. Leeds, fancy meeting you again in the same crowd!

Both Rain and September were staring at me, then Rain halted and the circle stopped. Automatically, we all glanced at the empty centre as if it were to be protected soon against the thudding onrush of feet.

‘The cat, Dover, I once carried a pussy asleep in my arms. I should have both my arms free, don’t you think, in case he chooses me again.’

But she didn’t loosen the grip of her hands. What were her eyes doing! No, Rain never wept. We five, the others, all of us, did many things in the open, but crying-no. It became a freakish sight, a joke of sorts, just like Standing room only, uttered by some of the newcomers at the first surprise of being surfaced among us.

I had to say something to Rain, and quickly, about the kitten and other transient pets, about cats in general if necessary, before the Leeds man with the prowling neck could pounce on his new opportunity and announce for all of us to know that on this overthronged jewel of ours we humans had every conceivable priority over animals, and that cats were dangerously adaptable even in our congested circumstances; so much so that they would prove a special menace, had they existed still.

‘Cats hide in the trees, they climb them, you know,’ September spoke in a tone one occasionally had to adopt to help those who had never seen a creature other than man.

‘I’ll be a tree,’ I heard Rain’s threatening phrase, ‘I’ll be a standing, immovable tree, my roots and leaves spattered with the thickest drops of rain, a true, gushing, swishing, slithering rain.’

‘Real rain doesn’t stain,’ I said. She liked my rhyme; it had helped her to accept her own name. ‘Keep moving.’ She recognized my command by the change of tone.

‘Hand in hand, tighten your grip, look into the centre, look hard—hard into our own centre.’

This was a moment of danger. There had been and there would be many moments like this: the circle near the point of breaking, because of the two women, my coincidental wives and the two drowsy men, my coincidental brothers whom I had to keep attached to the hooks on my belt because their hands were still so feeble. And above our five revolving heads there hovered a pivoting turret of a neck, watchful for every potential weakness, for a breach, a passage of entry, so that he could penetrate my self-winding system, he a mere parasite, a floater deposited by the human tide near a box so much like any other box.

‘We’re well looked after though, aren’t we, Dover? The air’s quite good, hardly any dust these days, considering the constant wear and tear of the surface. A variety of colours, too. Pink does rather become you, Dover. Amazing how they manage those lights in the sky-roof, don’t you agree? After pink comes pale blue, then music. The island will be full of noises. Soft at first, later rumbling like a distant thunder. Feeding-time. The heavens will open and drop riches into our lap.’

‘Into our open hands,’ I said. Leeds opened his, looked at the palms, put them together and pulled a pious expression over his face. Whom was he trying to appease: himself? me! my wives! those who were pushing at him from either side of the box?

perhaps the skymen? But the skymen didn’t seem to mind what we felt about them, they never interfered, never showed themselves to us and had no apparent desire to communicate with us by any other means. We only saw the shadows of their silent traffic through the coloured domes which looked so transparent when shut, and yet had the thickness of metallic rock whenever they opened, sliding over one another. But the falling flakes of food or the shafts of rain would always confuse the eyes. The traffic shadows were curved and ran at irregular intervals, encircling us like hoops from above.

September’s knees jerked, her whole body began to sag, although our circle was not yet in full motion. She would soon simulate her fainting fit. I had to risk letting her fall on to the ground in the middle. I grabbed the flabby hands of my brothers and the gap closed at once. She was lying curled up, wriggling her hips and pounding her thighs. I saw Rain watch her with an absent-minded smile as before.

‘It’s coming, I feel it. Tell me what I feel, tell.’ September dug her jaw into the earth and became rigid.

I told her: ‘Remember, remember, your month is September.’

‘Bring her into the box!’ Leeds shouted. ‘I’m keeping the door ready.’ He was pressing against it, his neck taut and more sinewy than ever.

‘No, it’s not the child.’ My voice was calm. What did he know of September? He couldn’t possibly irritate me this time. ‘My wife’s already been in the box,’ I said.

‘She stayed inside the box much longer than me.’ Rain giggled at her own words.

‘When I grow into the earth,’ now only her eyes smiled, ‘I’ll have children high up on my branches, until the rain washes them all down. But they won’t go far underground.’

‘The earth is good to lie on,’ September spoke into the gravel which was touching her lips.

This prompted Leeds to say his piece:

‘I once lay down for hours, but I didn’t like it. No, Dover, I didn’t like it, remember? Got up all cramps and twitches, scratched myself all over. And yet for years I had been longing to feel what it was really like. When they were stampeding, you know, there was suddenly so much space. Acres of it. You would never have known there could be that much ground under your feet.’ He gasped and scratched his neck.

Now it all came clear to me, cascading down the lightning of memory.’

‘Leeds, you started that stampede,’ and after a pause I muttered, ‘at Leeds,’

feeling somewhat deflated by the repetition.

‘Good, you know my name. As well as I know yours, Dover. It was a great sight, wasn’t it? And the dust, mound after mound of dust. Millions died.’ Leeds was lying this time. None of us ever saw birth or death. Our race had two genders, countless number, we were inside the future, made precise by its perfective aspect. And although some of us could experience the three-dimensional shape of time, we lived here on the surface, never witnessing birth and death; all middle-aged, disposing of our redundant habits in those hygienic containers, large enough to admit three persons and to serve as landmarks.

Leeds was still talking, propped against the door of the box.

‘So you see, Dover, I am fully convinced that man is a standing animal.’

At this moment music began and as it went on vibrating within the domes, chinks appeared along the lines where the panels could slide over. There was no need to fear intruders sneaking into my circle. Every human in the crowds around me stood calm.

Arms moved up into the air tinged with blue and yellow, and hands were opening in a receiving gesture.

September was already on her feet, her eyes following the slow descent of food flakes. The hands of Leeds resembled scales balancing the vigilance of his neck.

‘I’ve been wondering for some time whether one could start a panic at a serene moment like this!’

‘A stampede, why!’

‘When we have filled our bellies you’d better admit me into your family circle.

And then we’ll have a long talk about the ways and means of migration.’

2

Leeds is gone.

This is a wishful figure of speech, but inaccurate like most phrases we brought with us when we surfaced. Gone, departed briskly, walked away in a huff, as if one could re-enact any of these verbs. Leeds simply received a powerful push from the box door; his neck failed to warn him that there were three busy people inside, cleansing themselves, viewing the past, fingering objects and one another, gurgling, prodding and what not. Then he was drawn into one of those sudden whirlpools, he drifted with a crowd, caught his leg in some entangled tubes that come out from the ground like worms, said a rude salutation to whatever nose happened to land on his, and now he was probably on the crest of a north-bound multitude, floating back to Leeds or along a draughty coastal zone, or just bobbing to and fro, a mile hither, a mile thither, as I invariably do when alone and out of the circle.

Eventually, you are flung out like a pebble, the communal stomach coughs you up, but there is always another haven of a box, a depository.

Rain and September had already forgotten Leeds. Rain said a while ago:

‘There will be much water from the sky, today or tomorrow, and I shall grow leaves.’ She was still looking at September. I wish September could sometimes be against her. I tried so hard from the start to make them see that they were different and that being different didn’t mean for them an ugly face, a lying voice, or a barren womb. But September echoed herself.

‘I dropped my child into the earth. The rain will wash it out—Dover.’ Each time she called me by my name, it sounded as if she had thought it up that very second. She believed she had given birth to a boy in the box. Maybe she did, it wasn’t impossible.

Why a boy, I once asked, you didn’t see him at all, you said. He dropped down heavily, he must have been a boy, she replied, and then1 said my soothing ‘Remember, remember, your month is September.’

‘Real rain goes deep, and . . .’ now she didn’t finish because my brothers Joker and Sailor were waking up. I felt their double pull at my hooks, then their right feet jerked forward, kicked the gravel and began to rummage in the clotted sand. Soon they uncovered two metal discs, lifted them together with the tubes that were buried in the earth, adjusted them for length and inserted their organs. No effort to speak of, no discomfort. Whatever we excreted was sucked into the subterranean channels, you could sense a pressure throbbing in the tubes when you held them, but that seemed to be the only evidence of the mechanism at work. And you never worried whether you would find a disc within the range of your moving feet: the whole island was studded with them, they made you trust the surface you trod on; the surface had been well prepared for the future which we now inherited from our ancestral expectations.

Click, click, and the tubes slipped in, swallowed by the pressure. The metal muted the sound, and the feet, out of habit, kicked some sand over them. Now my coincidental brothers were ready to relieve themselves of whatever their drowsy heads had accumulated by night: being the last to surface, they hadn’t as yet shed the dregs of an earlier memory which attracted this and that from the mental traffic that passed over us like the shadows on the other side of the domes. Had I not called them brothers, they would still be roaming aimlessly at the edge of crowds. Sailing from bottom to bottom, as Sailor put it for Joker’s appreciation. Sailor was fond of asking me:

‘How do you know we are your brothers!’ This was an intelligent question.

‘Because to me you are two.’ This they accepted, it made sense to them and also stood for a sign which I wanted to see in them. They already thought of themselves as two. So did my wives, though being female they couldn’t separate the trees they each desired to be and the babies they each bore and lost or imagined they had borne and lost.

To impose family ties and to reinforce them was my purpose. I invented and repeated their names, I listened to their talk and gibberish, I gave them the security of a circular motion and the freedom of the patch they could watch and lie in, one at a time, wriggling in remembered pain, resting or just gaping at the shadows of the skymen’s traffic.

I created the circle and the circle was beginning to create relationships. Leeds could have disrupted my work, I knew the migrants of chaos, I had seen panic and stampede more than once. But Leeds was gone and receding, adrift on his own sea of troubles. And the island had safety zones along the shores, against which no tempest was tall and strong enough to raise its foaming fists.

Joker had a story to tell. I was glad for Rain’s sake that a cat came into it, or rather couldn’t come out of it, as soon became obvious.

‘Once upon the other side of time,’ Joker began, ‘there was a real cat sitting in a blue plastic saucer, and the saucer was floating in a pond, and the pond was filled with milk to the brim. Now the cat couldn’t swim and he couldn’t get at the milk because each time he bent his big head the saucer tilted and the cat was afraid of falling into all that white milk. So he sat and sat in his blue saucer, and licked those few little drops of milk which he had caught on to his whiskers while bending. And then his wet whiskers dried in the sun and became so stiff, long and straight that the cat couldn’t pass through the reeds near the edge of the pond.’

‘How do you know that he had whiskers!’ said Sailor.

‘Because we both know it from that picture.’ This satisfied Sailor. They must have seen something like this on a micro-screen in the box.

Rain looked now at Joker now at me with glittering blue smiles in her enormous eyes. She didn’t, of course, understand what the pond, milk or the reeds meant, she had only a hazy idea about swimming and drowning, but the cat sounded familiar and warm which she liked as much as my constant repetition of her name. Blue, too, was the colour which belonged to her. She didn’t care what happened to Joker’s cat in the end. The word cat was all she wanted to hear, and each repetition titillated her smiles. But I was curious to catch the end of the story by its whiskers.

‘How did the cat manage to get out, Joked’

‘Out of what!’ said Sailor and tugged at my belt.

‘Out of the milk pond.’ He was satisfied.

‘The cat churned and churned his blue saucer,’ said Joker beaming all over his moon face, ‘until he made a pondful of butter. Then he walked out, leaving a trail of paw-marks on the butter, so we caught him not far from those reeds.’

‘Who caught him, Joked?’ Sailor looked worried and Rain’s blue eyes switched off the last smile. September sighed.

‘You and me, Sailor, us both.’

‘That’s good,’ said Sailor, ‘there is no more cat.’ And he set the circle in slow motion on his own initiative which astonished me.

‘We have a big saucer in the middle,’ Joker pointed at our free space, enclosed by our trotting feet. This was his first attempt at discovery and he looked puzzled and much amused.

‘This is called saucer. Saucer.’ Repeating the word, September grasped the analogy.

‘But it isn’t blue,’ said Rain. I marvelled at her display of intelligence, even though it was achieved at the expense of the cat whom I knew she had suddenly forgotten. My coincidental family was making progress. It seemed to matter less that we were only a minute inner circle surrounded by loops, zigzagging streaks and millions of dithering dots.

Stationary for a while, with my back to the crowds, I felt a new commotion like the first murmur of a tide. Then followed a splash, voices breaking against a loud voice, riding high against a communal sound barrier.

‘Can you see anything, Sailor’ He was the tallest in the circle but he had neither Leeds’s neck nor its agility. With his right hand above his eyes he was endangering the continuity of the circle, then he made a funny face to please Joker, dropped his hand and muttered in his usual drowsy way:

‘It’s not this box and it’s not the other. Can’t look over too many heads, it sends my eyes to sleep.’

‘Look again, Sailor.’ But this time I could hear the voice, each word magnified by the air. It seemed to resound against the domes and come down through their purple and golden haloes.

‘Listen—listen to the good tidings! A tree—a true tree—was born in the West under the open sky—and it is alive. It will bear fruit-and the fruit will multiply. And believe me—no storm from inside the sea—no fire from beyond the sky roof will prevail-against the tree!’

I strained my neck and my eyes, and saw head after head turn towards the voice.

The third box, Rain cried, the third from us; she couldn’t possibly have seen it, she was shorter than September, but I believed her and stood on tiptoes. Yes, there was a man on the top of a box, the third in the distance after the one to which Leeds had clung for weeks. The man seemed much older than any of us, he was in fact a strange exception to the age rule which bound us here to a communal identity, similar habits and health.

‘Why has he forgotten to die?’ September said. Like Rain, she saw the man without using her eyes.

I noticed that we had stopped circling. There was a hush over us and over those unaccountable people facing the box from which the man had spoken.

‘We hear thunder.’ Joker was nudging Sailor, who couldn’t hear a thing because he had fallen asleep. ‘They’re coming!’ a woman shrieked behind the box nearest to us.

Metal discs started popping up everywhere, tubes gushed out from the earth and swayed like snakes before collapsing into the loosened clods. There was suddenly dust at the level of our ankles, thickening as it rose.

Before the panic seized the people by their knees and necks and threw them down in heaps, I saw the old man on the box stagger and disappear through the roof as if it had a trap panel. And immediately another female cry reached me from the whirlpool of dust.

‘They’re crushing everything! They are here!’

My circle was broken. Joker and Sailor had jumped into the nearest box and slammed the door behind them. I grabbed my wives and somehow managed to push their small hands through the hooks on my belt, then I fell to the ground, pulling them down.

My arms were trying to embrace the corner of the box. The stampede was already upon us. I received a knock on my head and back, I felt a stinging pain all down my right leg.

Oh, we were too healthy on this island to cheat pain by losing consciousness. Thunder after thunder convulsed the surface.

Then I felt a soothing coldness on my neck. It spread and was followed by a different hush than that before the stampede.

‘It’s rain,’ said my first wife.

‘It’s the greatest rain I ever thought of,’ said my second wife. And the rain was rinsing our hair, sparking off pebbles from the ground, whizzing over the grit in the hollows.

‘They’ve sent it down to stop the panic.’ I meant the skymen.

‘Nice to see you again, Dover,’ I heard a voice bending over me. ‘I couldn’t think of any faster means of transport to reach you at this very same spot. Get up, Dover, you’re quite all right. My stampede was not as bad as it sounded.’

I looked up and saw his condescending neck.

‘You need another pair of hands in your circle, Dover. The five of you couldn’t hold out.’ Leeds lifted me up and clasped my hand. ‘Where are those brothers of yours?’

And then we witnessed a sight in the half-opened skies. A rainbow hung there, reflecting a small tree. Raindrops shimmered all over the reflection, as if the tree wore a robe for this annunciation.

3

‘Shut the door,’ said Joker, ‘we can’t hear a thing.’ I squeezed myself in and smelt the familiar odour of disinfectants, then perfume, both quickening the desire to touch, watch and recollect. ‘That’s where we come from, I think.’ Sailor was pointing at the underground map of Britain, flashing section after section against a net of squares, which seemed to be suspended beyond the wall of the box. This was how images appeared, extending the tangible area. Sailor knocked his fingers badly, when he tried again to show a line on the map.

‘We could hear a train before you came in. You know there are trains running under England, from Dover to Leeds, from London to Durham, places like that, and that’s where we come from.’

‘From down there,’ Joker said.

‘Oh, yes—I would like now to be on the small Inner Circle and on the big one which doesn’t stop at many places. You see names flicker by and then it’s York, you don’t get off, because you want to go round a full circle, London to London, all the time under the coast, with waves splashing three thousand feet over your head. It’s fun, and that’s where we came from, Joker and me.’

‘And you, too, I think,’ Joker said. He tried to embrace me but there wasn’t enough room for that. Then the box started exhaling whiffs of petrol and fried fish, a saucer rolled by, milk oozed from one of the squares and a puzzled cat walked right across the map and vanished, it seemed, into Joker’s hair.

‘That’s him,’ said Sailor, ‘the pond will come next.’

But it didn’t. Instead, for a well-focused moment we saw a boy munching a sandwich on an Underground platform. A poster behind him said Top People Wear Hats.

‘He looks like you, Dover.’ I felt Sailor’s finger on my nose. ‘Though he could be me,’ he added. Then his voice thickened. ‘It’s time I had a wife or two, you know.’

As he was saying this, the screens around the wall merged into one another, the net remained behind them but now it looked more like grating with several paler bars reinforcing a further background. Animals emerged, big, small and partly visible, they paced along the net, yawning and sneezing, then the smaller of them began to leap through the squares, somehow missing us by an inch or less, then they reappeared, one by one, on the screen opposite.

‘I should have a couple of wives, you know,’ Sailor whispered into my ear and his hot fingers fondled my elbow for a while.

‘That bitchdog stinks,’ Joker made a spitting noise. ‘She’s on heat. Keep away from her, Sailor.’ He tried his best, now leaning against me, now against his brother.

Across the full length of the screen an elongated spaniel was mounting the bitch, regardless of the bars and squares, his enthusiastic tail whipping his own behind as his head moved back and forward. After the dogs, pigeons and hens flapped their wings. The cackling was hysterical, and feathers flew about for the arrival of the cock, who made a jumping entry into the turmoil, copulated briskly from hen to hen, glancing at us sideways with a beady, cynical eye. Now, gentlemen, I’m not boasting, it’s just a job and it’s already done.

Animals were our educators: we hardly ever viewed human performances.

Sometimes by mistake a scene from the surface registered itself on the screens as it was taking place outside: a standing couple, a standing copulation. Or the memory would I throw up a picture on to a confusion of hind legs, tails, tongues and beaks. Now it came. I remembered and simultaneously saw, and they saw with me. Rain, bending forward, September supporting Rain’s head with her legs; my belly flattened against Rain’s buttocks, trying to raise them. She bent farther down, sweat from her spine now trickling towards the neck, and the whole balance of Rain’s body seemed to flow into the knees and the hands below them.

‘Rain, I have your eyes now’—and the feathery, cackling noise fell upon September’s words.

‘And were we then your brothers?’ Sailor asked me when the picture vanished.

‘I don’t remember. Let’s get out of here.’ Joker helped me to find the lock on the door.

In the pale blue of late afternoon Leeds had prepared an acrobatic surprise for me.

With every muscle proclaiming his sturdy masculinity, he displayed Rain and September swinging from his arms. Very slowly he turned round, his arms locked in a clasp behind that turret of a neck.

‘I’ll give you three guesses, Dover.’

I stood in silence, nudged and jostled by the passers-by. Feeding-time was near.

‘We are a tree,’ Rain explained. She couldn’t possibly wait through my hesitation.

‘A trunk and two branches. I am drooping with rain.’

‘We are also the scales of September in the sign of Libra,’ my second wife said.

Remember, remember. I couldn’t remember whether I had even made love to her.

Perhaps she only held the other’s head and balanced the act like that scale in the Zodiac sign.

‘And I am a water-carrier,’ said Leeds, ‘with two pails swaying under my arms. I have to walk and walk. Which reminds me, Dover. The girls, your wives I mean, are keen on a long walk. As far as the tree.’

‘The tree?’ A stay in the box, however brief, had its side effect: I felt dense and dopey. A headache was throbbing in my temples.

‘The girls say they actually saw it in the sky. The tree apparent, you might call it that. Anyway, Dover, we’re going to have a sort of pilgrimage as in the days of yore.’

‘Once upon the other side of time there was a solitary tree—’ Joker began and stopped, giving his brother a wink. ‘You go on, Sailor, it’s your story.’

‘It’s nobody’s story,’ Sailor said, stretching his hand out. ‘Besides, how can you tell anything without having a circle ?’

‘I am coming!’ Rain jumped off Leeds’s arm as though it were a real branch, hugged me with a strange, wistful softness in her finger tips, but September didn’t follow her: she was still swinging, Leeds straining his neck to keep the balance. Finally he put her down.

‘A water-carrier must have two pails,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that right, Dover?’

‘We’re weak without a circle.’ And I took September’s hand.

‘You are my first husband, Dover,’ she announced this like a discovery. ‘And I am his first wife. It’s nice to have two scales in September.’ She beckoned to Leeds to join our family. He tried to do it gracefully, with a deep bowing gesture, but in the middle of the bow a puffed-up man dumped his wobbly belly on his behind and seemed glad to meet such a convenient obstacle. I laughed, then laughed again, bursting my first bubble of jealousy at this ridiculous sight. But it also brought back the memory of the erotic scene, and brief anger replaced jealousy.

Willy-nilly, I found in Leeds a co-maker of relationships. The circle was in full swing.

And our journey to the West began. We were making for the coast, so Leeds assured us, but nothing in the air or in the colours ahead indicated a change of scenery.

Only the distances between the boxes seemed a little shorter, though this could have been an illusion of movement. We certainly moved faster, edging groups of people, bypassing altogether those corridors of traffic which went parallel to a double row of boxes. Leeds was tireless in giving advice and trying to impress us. His neck acted as a permanent guide, his elbows as ploughshares through a thick crowd. He also invented a revolving pulley which did pull and did go round, but in fact consisted of his two hands on our joined arms, giving a push here, a push there, with Leeds remaining on the outside like our satellite. Someone called him that, probably Sailor, who knew a bit of astronomy from the screens, and Leeds must have been pleased because he pushed even harder at our turning hoop. From time to time he let us hear his statistical figures which he had been working out in his head.

‘It’s one man per one square yard on the average. Which should be ample. But you have to take away twenty-five square yards or so out of every fifteen hundred for the area occupied by the boxes. That’s why the congestion differential is not easy to apply.

With two people swinging on your arms, however, you could improve the ratio, but that, of course, would require quite a few mobile squads of athletes.’

We never talked about the purpose of our pilgrimage, the tree. Now and again Rain would be on the point of mentioning it, but somehow a gesture imitating a branch or a static pose satisfied her. On the day we reached the Safety Zone my brothers became restless, they muttered to themselves, dozed off for several minutes at a time, then couldn’t get rid of their dreams. When the first warning notice came up through the hazy, oppressive air, Sailor at last found the words to express his anxiety:

‘A tree is for hanging, I am telling you, and it’s usually a sailor who dangles from the rope.’ Joker nodded in approval, his moon face reflecting a remote once-upon-a-time mood.

‘And when the sailor had a brother they used to hang them both for good company. It’s no joke being a brother,’ Joker said in my direction.

I felt the sand loosening under my steps. Rain didn’t like the sensation and dragged her feet. Leeds, being heavier, seemed to he walking with a limp. The landscape became crooked and we came up to a box which had no door and was sagging from the slope of a dune together with a wide yellow board. A warning in black letters jumped at us from the yellow:

You are entering the Safety Zone. You will Bet no food, no air heating, no protection. Domes end 100 yards after this point.

We all turned our faces upwards. September let my hand go and I heard her trembling voice.

‘I can see the colours—four of them—falling into a pit.’

In fact she saw the beginning of grey clouds evenly spread over the coast. I didn’t mind that the circle was breaking up, each clasp released from the pressure of fingers.

Only a hundred yards: how many steps were required to test this distance? The distance was echoing the invisible sea, like a shell.

‘It’s old rain from the open sky lying on the ground,’ Rain said to September, not knowing how to describe the noise of the sea; and arm-in-arm they walked ahead, like sisters rather than wives. But not for long. Their arms dropped and Rain staggered. Then September fell into the sand. She picked herself up and stumbled again.

‘What’s wrong?’ Leeds asked, but didn’t move forward.

‘Can’t you see they are unable to walk? Let’s go and help them.’

Leeds hesitated. He looked back at the warning sign and then his neck became all veins and bulging red blobs. His head seemed to be screwed into fear.

‘You go, Dover. I’ll follow you presently.’ And to my great surprise he followed me, stooping and testing the sand with each step. I shouldn’t have turned to watch him.

My eyes blinked and were suddenly filled with salty air which ached. The salty moisture settled on my lips, and before I could wipe it off each feature on my face felt numb.

I reached the women on all fours, leaving Leeds a couple of yards behind me.

‘I am sick,’ September was retching into the wet sand but nothing came out of her mouth. Her wriggling fit had just left her, she managed to raise herself on her knees. So did Rain and Leeds behind us. We were all crouching, incapable of standing up or frightened to do so. That crouching position, the strain in the knees, the sweat down the spine; so much like our sexual act, now disarmed of passion, feeble, self-mocking, having its nose rubbed in the sand.

‘The space . . .’ September whispered into my hot face, ‘it’s terrible, so terrible without people.’ ‘We’ve grown accustomed to moving in crowds and circles,’ I said.

‘We’re bound to lose balance without a human prop.’

‘But I thought I was born in the sign of balance.’

‘I know, September, I know. Remember, remember. . . .’

She interrupted my memory verse:

‘Leeds showed me the scales on his arms. Where is Leeds?’

‘There,’ I said, and an ugly tone of satisfaction prompted my next words: ‘He’s on all fours, as well as you and me.’

When finally Leeds crawled up to us, he made a fool of himself by trying to amend his previous statistical revelation:

‘One man per one square yard is a reasonable average in our spacial circumstances, but sometimes you have to allow for factors like primitive sand and a surface vacuum which wasn’t caused by a stampede. This proves, of course, that we are being well looked after.’

‘My feet,’ I heard Rain’s cry. This time I succeeded in getting up, but had to walk carefully with my legs wide apart. ‘I’m growing into the earth. It’s very painful, Dover, to feel the roots. . . .’

Without thinking I pulled her legs out of the sand and recognized blood above and below her ankles.

‘The roots, what have you done to my new-born limbs? Like myself she had never seen blood, but unlike myself she possessed no knowledge of it.

‘We’ll take you back,’ I said.

And we struggled through the empty zone, carrying her body which became our link, a safe and tangible weight to be shared and absorbed into our own strength. Joker and Sailor stood waiting by the broken-down box, their two silhouettes more comforting than the light and the music of the domes. Back on the communal side of the surface, we ate the food from the sky, slept standing in the circle and dreamt of one another. Rain’s feet were cured by the morning.

But once we had tasted the danger and the challenge, we could not stay away from the Safety Zone. We walked once again beyond the warning sign, this time keeping our heads down, with arms almost touching the sand. Joker and Sailor wanted to be with us, and for their sake the tree remained an unspoken word.

Sailor was the first to spot the tree. It stood on a rock, he told us, not far from the shore, very small and quiet. His gestures were confused and at first we couldn’t follow them. Rain buried her feet into the sand and tightened her whole body, staring and waiting.

Before we finally saw the tree, we were made to witness a gruesome sight. The surface of the sea between the shore and the rock seemed to be paved with thousands of heads.

‘They came before us,’ said Leeds.

‘They’re drowning,’ said Sailor.

‘We’re not allowed to see death,’ I said and covered my eyes.

Underground

1

‘I have two mothers,’ then people laughed which Patrick liked very much. It made him happy to be laughed at. ‘My first mother is away singing, and my second mother is very kind, and she takes me for walks in Kensington Gardens.’ And people laughed less, and didn’t ask him about his father. Which was a pity. Because Patrick could have told them what a good sleeper his father was, by day and by night, and on the Underground too.

Patrick’s second mother lived alone in a dolled-up house glued with pink-and-blue edging and some ivy to another and much bigger house, from which a poodle kept yelping at unusual hours. The Fulham Road corner of the street smelt of fresh paint and the other corner seemed for ever buried in garbage stink, which fascinated Patrick on their walks to the bus.

After four or five visits to Dolly-mum at her ivy doll house, Patrick couldn’t any longer delay that surprise call on his father, who disliked being woken up before half past one in the afternoon. But Dolly said again and again that boys should be chummy with their dads, who had chums everywhere, and that to knock on a bedroom door at lunch-time was quite all right if you happened to be a little chum yourself. She took him as far as number five, just behind a pub in the backwaters of Chelsea at World’s End, and sometimes when she looked tired or worried Dolly-mum would add her maternal advice:

‘Patrick, listen to me, you must keep reminding him you are his son. Men are forgetful, stupid and stingy with money, they never try to save on drink, oh no, but they save on presents. I know men, they’re all misers. So you ask him what you want, Patrick, don’t be shy.’

‘I don’t want anything, Dolly-mum. I have you and my other mummy, and father always says do-you-need-a-quid? and I say no, dad. What is a quid?’

‘A pound, Patrick. Next time he asks you, you just take that quid of his, and buy yourself a plastic wallet at Woolworth’s to have it ready for more money. Now you run along, knock hard on his door and kiss him good morning on the ear. That will wake up your dad. And don’t tell me his ear has whiskers like a cat. I know it has.’

Patrick was a slow but obedient boy, and he did what Dolly-mum told him. That kiss on the ear made a loud smacking noise, and his father jumped up, hit the flowery headboard where the biggest stain was, and grabbed a packet of cigarettes from the table, which somehow restored his sense of balance.

Coach!’ he said. ‘Who is it, who is it? My head! And now what? Where are those damned matches? Ah, thank you.’ He looked at the clock on a marble stand, then at Patrick, lit a Cigarette, coughed volubly and inhaled again.

‘It’s only a quarter past one. Find me the telephone book, there’s a good girl.’

Patrick transported the volumes one by one, drew the curtains, but not far enough, because he couldn’t give them a sharp pull. His father said from semi-darkness:

‘Oh, it’s you, Patrick. That beastly telephone rang straight into my ear.’ He showed which one, and screwed his little finger into it. ‘Still ringing. Horrible.’ Patrick couldn’t see any whiskers at all. ‘Had early lunch at school, my boy?’

‘I am not at school, father. They chucked me out because of those small cherry-trees, don’t you remember, dad?’

‘Ah, yes, we must find a school for you. It’s bad at your age to be missing school lunches, you know. What did you do to those trees, Patrick?’

‘I pulled them all out, eight in one row and seven in another. They had no sun where they were.’ ‘Well-they must have been badly planted. Not deep enough.

You’re strong though for a boy of nine. Wait like a good . . . child while 1 give my chums a couple of tinkles. Take something to read from the floor.’

‘I can’t read, father,’ said Patrick. He could, however, count to ten, some days to eleven, so he watched the dial and the cigarettes. His father made nine telephone calls and smoked four cigarettes. The ninth call was to a lady chum who must have invited him to afternoon tea or maybe to a walk, because he looked pleased, beckoned to Patrick to sit on the bed and gave him one solid pat on the head.

‘Who washed your hair?’

‘Dolly-mum. Yesterday.’

‘How is old Dolly these days! Must give her a tinkle tonight. Now let’s go to the pub. I’ll have a quick bite and you sit outside drinking bitter lemon.’

‘May I have tomato juice, father?’

‘And who on earth taught you this bad habit! Anyway you’ll have your juice and potato crisps to drown the taste with.’

He laughed ho-ho-ho, tried the outside atmosphere with his toes, then pushed the blanket off with the other leg, and as briskly as ever dressed himself and gave Patrick a grin from the mirror when he started to shave. Dad’s night whiskers hadn’t grown much, Patrick thought; the electric razor buzzed around his pink face for a minute, and all was done, or almost. Ah, the hat! With the hat on, his father retired to the lavatory, and while he was lingering there, Patrick wondered what it would be like to have his two mothers and his father as well, in this very room, with him, Patrick, fetching heavy telephone books, drawing curtains, watching them all dress, and sleeping, of course, somewhere in the midst of them, under those flowers on the headboard. They would be a busy family, bumping into one another most of the time, which he wouldn’t mind, and they would also laugh at their Patrick, to Patrick’s unending delight.

The bite in the pub lasted long, until closing time in fact, at three o’clock, but Patrick didn’t mind waiting outside in the doorway. The only thing that bothered him was a puddle of vomit at his feet which a funny man with a beard had left in a great hurry. A cat approached the puddle, thinking no doubt it looked like milk from a tin mixed up with butter but he jumped aside in disgust, and that was that. Soon after, Patrick heard ‘time gentlemen please, time,’ and his father emerged, noticed the puddle, and jumped over it very much as the cat would have done, if he had been inside the pub for a bite.

‘Why are you standing near this filth, Patrick?’

‘Because you told me to wait and not go too far from the door.’

‘Patrick, you’re quite a character, ho-ho-ho!’ The hand patting his chin wasn’t allowed to withdraw; he pressed it to his lips until the ho-ho noise subsided. This was how love sounded, and Patrick could listen to it every time he made his father laugh at him.

‘What were the potato crisps like? Stale?’

‘Yes, daddy, stale.’

‘Sorry, son. The pub is damp. Too near the river. Let’s have a change of air.

We’re going to Bayswater.’

Patrick’s father had one of his houses there, but didn’t live in it, of course. He simply wouldn’t be able to sleep in any of his flatlets because of the thin partitions.

They went down into the South Kensington Tube station and looked at the lighted names on the indicator. Patrick recognized the letter ‘W’ and kept quiet about it.

‘Never comes when you want it, the Inner Circle train. You’d better pop into the loo like a good girl. Heaps of time. It’s upstairs.’

Patrick shook his head twice, once for being called a good girl and the second time because he didn’t want to pee at South Kensington. It would be more fun at the other end, in Bayswater. He hoped his father wouldn’t insist, like Dolly-mum. She had a thing about Patrick popping into every public convenience they passed on their walks in the park; just in case, she would say. No, his father didn’t insist; he decided to go up himself, but returned soon, just as the train was pulling up.

‘It’s Inner Circle,’ Patrick shouted, and they both jumped in smartly. Patrick touched a hard lump on his father’s pocket, then a bottle showed its neck as they were about to choose seats.

‘How did you know it was the right train? You can’t read.’

‘Because I thought you knew, father.’

‘That was clever of us.’ He glanced round, ‘We have a carriage to ourselves, Patrick. But isn’t it stuffy here?’ He took a gulp from the bottle, grimaced at the label on it, drank a little more and flopped into a seat under the drawing of a bottle-neck with tiny people inside it. The next time Patrick looked at the picture his father was snoring.

The train went on, the doors opened and shut, letters jostled on blue strips, then stood still for a moment and retreated together with a station. Patrick meant to count the stations from the first after South Kensington, but the snoring and that bottleneck filled with men confused him. Real people were now entering and leaving the carriage, some stared at Patrick’s father and smiled, and since he couldn’t smile back because he was asleep, Patrick did it for him, which made a good impression all round. Then a blonde lady stepped in with a red umbrella and two parcels. She put them on the seat which so far nobody had occupied out of courtesy to Patrick’s father. The lady heard the snoring, was about to smile when his elbow slipped and tore the paper on one of her parcels.

Patrick didn’t catch what she muttered, but his father woke up with a start, tried to turn round, made another hole in the wrapping, and finally addressed the blonde lady:

‘Where are we, my dear?’

‘Look what you’ve done to my parcel.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. Please forgive me. Had an exhausting day at my chambers, then some idiot drove straight into my car. The poor child is still suffering from the shock. But there you are. . . . Where are we, my dear?’

‘South Kensington is next.’

‘Impossible.’

‘Are you all right?’ The blonde lady had a deep voice, and soon said what her name was, and Patrick’s father said his.

‘Augustus, and I use every letter in it. Unabridged, unshrinkable, that’s me, ho-ho-ho!’

Patrick didn’t want to listen. Women seemed angry with his father at first, then he talked and talked, then the women laughed, nudged him, powdered their noses outside a pub, asked how late it was, pushed the door, and in the end Patrick heard the ho-ho, nothing else.

Now he heard his own name mentioned to the blonde lady. She said something in a whisper, and his father replied just as the doors were breathing out.

‘He’s a bit backward, you see, on account of his mother being Bulgarian.’

‘Oh dear, it’s me. Gloucester Road.’

Patrick wanted the train to stay underground for a very long time and make bigger and bigger circles. His first mother had once been on a tour and he still remembered some of those towns: Oxford, Liverpool, Birmingham, York, Glasgow, Durham. And Leeds, too. Yes, he liked places to sound like that. Now he was travelling between York and Glasgow, all the way under the surface. The woman had just got off, his father helping her with the parcels to the door. ‘Preferably after ten.’ Her deep voice was no more, swallowed and closed up by the breathing doors.

‘Hurry—’ Patrick felt his father’s hand and jumped to his feet. ‘We’ve nearly missed this damned Bayswater again. Going round in circles.’

Patrick was standing on the platform, his head suddenly empty of all names. He tried to remember one at least so that he could tell it to his father.

‘Daddy, it’s Leeds.’

‘What? What did you say?’

‘Oh, nothing, father.’

‘I thought you said Leeds.’ Then he paused and laughed. ‘Ho-ho-ho, I’ll probably get there by mistake, if I have my next snooze at King’s Cross Station.’

2

‘Never had breakfast in my life.’

Augustus repeated his standard explanation to all his lady-friends, current, recent, past and antique. They suffered from seasonal fits of sentimentality over Patrick. Such a sweet, charming and affectionate boy, and you didn’t even allow him to stay the night in your place, because he might have disturbed your beauty sleep and asked for breakfast.

Augustus hated women when they started being dotty about the whims of the otherwise perfectly reasonable child who happened to be his and not theirs.

With his very own hands Augustus had dismantled the grimy gas-ring in his bedsitter to avoid the temptation of brewing tea for himself in the event of a morning hangover. His first meal was always lunch, preferably in a pub, and he never felt ill for fear of being hooked once more by some fuss-pot of a female. That was how the Bulgarian Vera had taken unfair advantage of his debilitated wits eleven years ago, when she had first seduced him after a bottle of vodka, then presented him with her Asiatic flu, and for a dismal week, day and night, nursed him straight into marriage. The singing bitch, she married him so much that after two years he found himself asserting his rights against the name of Boris. With his paternal claws he fought for the Irish and St. Patrick, though in fact he didn’t care about either.

And now the hens were cackling and cackling over his poor head. What has he ever done for that sweet, affectionate child of his!

‘I took him for a ride on the Inner Circle,’ he said proudly to Dolly on the telephone. ‘Yes, the Circle Line, under the ground, you know. We went round twice, and the boy loved every minute of it.’ Out of habit, Augustus tried a crack on Dolly the naive.

‘He arrived safely at Leeds. Father and son are doing well.’

‘Augustus, you’re drunk.’

‘I am never drunk, Dolly, you know that. I only get tipsy whenever I sip little kisses between your shoulder-blades. You have the most beautiful back in Kensington and Chelsea combined. Yes, you have, my lolly-Dolly.’

‘Oh, you’re the same wicked old billy-goat, Augustus.’

She sounded pleased, then became reminiscent, and Patrick sank into the depth of her maternal instincts, which in a bachelor girl of forty-nine were predictably safe below the surface.

On his next visit, however, Patrick found his father full of concern, which frightened him a little. He preferred being laughed at, hearing a yawn or two, and getting those casual single pats when he didn’t expect any.

‘Patrick, you’re going to live with your Dolly-mum.’ This both delighted and puzzled him.

‘Staying the night? He thought of the house next door. Would the dog sleep or bark? He had never seen a sleeping poodle, and was curious.

‘Yes, sleeping and eating, Patrick, it will be the same as at your aunt. . . .’

Augustus forgot which aunt Patrick had been staying with until now. The boy certainly had too many of them. Some were real, others he called aunt by analogy. Whoever put him to bed and got him out of it for breakfast performed an aunt’s functions. His two mothers were far too important to look after him in an ordinary way. Dolly-mum made sense with her blue teapot or on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The first mummy was even more special: she never poured tea, sat in a bus or trotted in the park; she had a warm voice, and floated on it somewhere in the world from Durham to Liverpool and round the circle. Perhaps Leeds was in Australia because the other day they told him about her tour in Australia.

Patrick couldn’t really grasp the new arrangement with Dolly-mum. He would never call her auntie. His thoughts were chasing picture after picture. The poodle would be barking its fuzzy head off when he saw him in the window at breakfast.

Then his father told him about the school. It was called St. Patrick. The word

‘Saint’ didn’t sound like anything he knew, but he approved of the idea that a boy could go to a school bearing his own name.

There must be as many schools as names, he thought, many more than those letters in the alphabet.

St. Patrick’s School put Patrick through the alphabet again. On good days he could read newspaper headlines in a loud voice behind people’s backs, on others, he whined and stammered over a nursery rhyme, or the Lord’s Prayer, until he was asked to leave the letters in peace. All his teachers walked about in white robes which amused him for a time, but he couldn’t get used to calling them all father without any discrimination about their age and height. He believed in only one father, he said, and they praised him for his piety. Finally, he found a way out: whenever he spoke to anyone of them he called him either yes-father or no-father, and this seemed to work well. They were now telling him that besides being pious he was also a polite boy. If Patrick had any sins left over from the interminable alphabet of the other school, the yes-and-no-fathers saw to it that he received a general cleansing. It came about like this: Patrick mentioned his two mothers, a small, kind laughter followed; Patrick went on about his first mother being a Bulgarian on tour, and one of the older yes-fathers suddenly became very itchy. He scratched the bald circle on his head, summoned a couple of no-fathers with whom he talked and nodded, walking up and down the quad; then all three returned and surrounded Patrick with probabilities.

‘We think there’s a probability you weren’t baptized at all. On the other hand, you may be a Greek-Orthodox, that’s quite possible, too. But your aunt was rather vague about your baptism.’ They meant Dolly-mum, but Patrick let them get away with this slip. He didn’t like being Greek and that other thing as well, whatever it was. The old yes-father said he would ring up Patrick’s only father to clarify the matter, as he put it.

This worried Patrick for hours: daddy could be so rude on the telephone when he was woken up at noon.

Days passed, and on the third of April the principal yes-father kissed Patrick on the head, gave him his own hand to be kissed in exchange, and then announced that the christening would take place in the school chapel next Sunday afternoon. ‘In private, of course,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, your father, Patrick, may not be able to attend, he’s developing a bad cold. It sounded like influenza on the telephone.’

Patrick was later told a few things, and asked how many gods there were in hell, and finally, to appease the most anxious no-father of them all, said:

‘Has the Orthodox god a longer beard?’

‘Judging by the icons, my child-yes, he has.’ The no-father smiled and Patrick saw love opening in that smile.

‘I prefer the one with the Catholic beard,’ he spoke with great conviction.

And they baptized Patrick just in case; and he became so pious that he could see words through the letters in some books and could guess numbers, too. He taught himself to spell Vera in three different ways, and wrote it down twenty-seven times in three rows.

Dolly-mum now gave him three rolls for breakfast which somehow made sense, and he chewed them carefully like a secret, straining his ears to hear the poodle. But the fuzzy mop never barked before nine o’clock. Out of piety, or happiness maybe, Patrick became as plump as a puppy.

‘You’re growing a paunch. Just like your daddy,’ Dolly-mum teased him, and Patrick was proud of his father, though he didn’t see much of him.

‘And my father gives me a quid every time I see him. Honest.’

His friend was Patrick, too, but had ginger hair like Saint Patrick on the coloured picture which hung in the corridor on the way to the lavatory.

‘Lend me a quid then,’ the other Patrick said.

‘I can’t. I left it in a wallet at Woolworth’s.’

This impressed the ginger Patrick; he never left anything at Woolworth’s.

The next afternoon, five minutes after closing time, Augustus exchanged a casual dialogue with his son. There was a bench out on the pavement, next to a rickety table, both smelling of spilled beer, so they sat down like the best of pals.

‘Too late for tomato juice. How is life treating you, my boy?’ A firm pat on the head followed and the ho-ho laughter. Paternal love had its reassuring sequences.

‘I’m growing a paunch like you, Dolly-mum says.’

‘She certainly keeps her figure, good old Dolly does. By the way, tell me, what was that baptism fuss about?’

‘I am a Christian now, daddy, properly christened. You forgot to do that, remember?’

‘Ah—’ said Augustus.

‘And my first mummy must have forgotten, too, because she was a Greek.’

‘A what?’

‘An Orthodox, father.’

‘She was the most Bulgar Bulgarian you ever saw, by Jove. I don’t want to see her again.’ Augustus stopped abruptly, looked sideways and began picking his nose.

Patrick sniffed very loudly.

‘Well, now,’ his father was still looking aside, ‘would you like a quid or something?’

‘As a matter of fact, I’d like a quid very much, thank you.’ Suddenly Patrick remembered why he had waited outside the pub since half past two.

Augustus rummaged in the pockets of his tweed jacket, then disturbed some loose coins inside his trousers; he was on the point of giving up when a wad of bank-notes fell onto the table. It was held together by a rubber band.

‘Must buy myself a wallet for Christmas.’

‘I’ll get you one at Woolworth’s,’ said his son.

‘That’s a nice kind thought, my boy. Take your pick.’ Patrick observed the rubber band, fingered the greenish edge, and very quickly pulled out two pound notes stuck together.

‘It’s a double quid, father.’

‘Have a double quid, then.’

And a few minutes later they parted at a bus stop, Augustus waving the green wad, which he then pocketed.

‘Why isn’t my first mummy seeing daddy? Is it because he forgot to baptize her as well?’ Patrick asked after supper, and Dolly-mum didn’t laugh at him, though she liked to have a good laugh before retiring to bed.

‘You’re old enough to know, Patrick,’ she said, ‘your daddy and your Vera-mum are divorced. They don’t live together. But she wasn’t really a very nice lady, if you know what that means.’

At school the following day, he gave a quid to Patrick Saint Ginger and asked him what he would do with it.

‘I’ll buy myself a filthy book, that thick,’ and the other Patrick showed him how thick. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you something for lending me that quid.’

They went to the lavatory and Patrick the Ginger shut the door. ‘I heard my mother pee. She went on and on and on. Have you ever heard your own ma in the pee-placer Patrick shook his head. ‘Now you pee,’ said the spotty Ginger, ‘and I’ll tell you if you are better and louder than her.’

But Patrick couldn’t do it. He stood clutching his penis, and then thought that perhaps he might treat himself to a ride in the Tube.

He went up to the booking office in Sloane Square station.

‘I want to go on the Circle Line.’

‘Where tor asked the man inside.

‘I’ll come back and tell you, sir.’ Patrick found the map on the wall, followed the yellow line with his finger, and returned to the clerk. There was no queue. ‘Aldgate, please,’ he said, and received a clinking handful of change.

Down below, Patrick found a tomato sandwich in a nice paper bag on the platform, next to a slot machine with chocolates. It tasted good. He waited patiently for the right train, watching the clock and the posters.

Patrick boarded the Inner Circle train at nine to four. That was what the clock showed him. It could have been the same carriage where he had sat with his father, because the picture with the tiny men in the bottle-neck was hanging on the right and the people inside kept looking at him as if they remembered him from that other round trip.

At Gloucester Road a lady with parcels entered, but she wasn’t blonde and had no umbrella. Two empty seats remained between her and the breathing doors.

Patrick made up his mind. He stepped forward, and with his legs well apart he urinated into the seat which was nearest to the door. It seemed hours before a man in a uniform took Patrick by the arm and walked with him along the platform, then all the way up to the surface. The elevator wasn’t working.

3

Patrick’s piety ascended to a foul sublimation after that incident on the Circle Line, which Dolly-mum refused to accept and pretended had never happened. The boy was given three rolls at breakfast, as before. The odd quid came his way as before.

Patrick didn’t, however, recover that loan of his, for the simple reason that he had to add five shillings to the pound to get the thick volume of muck from Patrick Saint Ginger. No, he couldn’t borrow it; books as filthy as that were never on loan; you had to buy them, Ginger explained, in great secret and keep your trap shut afterwards.

The volume was thicker than its content merited. A number of consecutive pages, and there were at least fifty of them in all, reappeared again and again between the covers, as if the printers had wanted to prove their priority rights before the common readers. Printed in Egypt, the muck classic had no title, no author’s name, but plenty of curious misspellings which, unfortunately, Patrick was as yet unable to appreciate. The pages, recurring at fairly regular intervals, gave a boost to his reading confidence: he recognized at a glance the intimate scenes between the headmaster, Horace Ball, and his star pupil, Fatty Hole; then words seemed to goggle their eyes at him from every line in the page.

Patrick found some filth less foul than the margins of the book, which had stains far deeper ingrained than those on his daddy’s headboard. He liked the schoolboys doing the same silly things to the masters, which the masters had previously done to them, but since he himself was a day-boy, he couldn’t quite imagine the strange dormitory described in the book. It was no use rushing to Patrick Saint Ginger for a quick explanation, for Patrick Ginger had his angry moods, and kept squeezing his spots out with one hand only. Besides, he didn’t look like a chap who would crawl under beds, dragging a chain. There were two bedrooms in Dolly’s small house, but no dormitory.

‘Have you got a whip under your bed, Dolly-mum!’ Patrick inquired in his serious voice.

The second mummy reacted with a shocked flush, which came up through the powder on her face.

‘I have nothing of the sort, Patrick! Neither under nor over, nor inside my bed. I wouldn’t dream of punishing you like some mothers do. Have I ever struck you, my pet!’

Patrick shook his head violently and repeated ‘oh, no, no!’ while Dolly-mum scrutinized him with her sharp eyes. Then she said very quietly: ‘Run to the loo, Patrick, like a good boy. You’re always holding it up.’

‘I’ve been, Dolly-mum. Twice.’

A week or two after the Easter holidays, Patrick received a present from abroad.

Even before he opened the dainty box, the ginger Patrick asked for the stamps and was promised them in exchange for eight spelling snorters in that book. The bargain seemed fair. Inside the box there lay something like a cat, very shiny though, because it was made of porcelain. And it had Ricordo di Venezia across a funny boat, inside which the cat was sitting, its mouth wide open. Taking the straw out from the bottom, Patrick found a card rimmed with gold. This time he had a harder struggle with the spelling and got stuck half-way.

Questo Batto cantante mandato con molto affetto al mio carissimo bambino Boris. Love Mother V. One of the cleverest yes-fathers, who also answered to the name of Pio, read the card aloud to Patrick, translated it into English as far as bambino Boris, asked who that was, and finally admired the singing cat in the boat.

‘That’s in Bulgarian, isn’t it, yes-father?’

‘No, Patrick, it’s in Italian.’

‘Are you sure, yes-father?’

‘Don’t say yes when you ask a question, child. I am positive. I spent ten years in the Vatican.’

‘That’s an awfully long time, Father Pio. I am also Boris. . . .’ Patrick hesitated, ‘my first mother thinks I am Boris.’

‘A nice name,’ said the cleverest yes-father and departed.

Patrick called the cat Boris, but only for a day. Then he changed his mind because one of the boys made a rude remark about the boat and said the cat wasn’t singing or rowing, but something-something, and so everybody laughed, at Boris, not at Patrick. From now on the cat went about hidden under Patrick’s blazer and under the new name ‘Ricordo’. Ricordo had a cool fur which was strange to touch.

The boat somehow got lost, and Ricordo went on singing in mid-air, until one evening his mouth, his whiskers, his tail and the rest became bits of porcelain on the floor. Patrick wept in his bedroom, fell asleep, woke up and began praying to Father Pio, who was the cleverest yes-father and knew Saint Vatican personally.

Again he sent himself to sleep, but after dreaming about the poodle and some people from the house next door, he got up in a different mood. The taste of the rolls speeded up his morning associations. All of a sudden he was caught up inside the foul sublimation.

With a piece of chalk in his pocket he jumped onto a bus, but didn’t go as far as the school. Instead he took another bus, number thirty-one, and arrived at World’s End before nine. He entered the familiar doorway, very quietly, walked up the stairs to the first landing and stopped outside his father’s bedsitter. One look round just in case. A sleepers’ den it really was, not a soul stirred at this hour. Patrick’s chalk moved across the brown door, and words dropped into three neat rows. He smiled a foul farewell to each one as he passed it to write the next.

Piss, puke, he wrote and smiled twice, then ffuk Venezia poachd balls oil yore arse, and pisss again, with as many s’s as he could twirl into the space left near the edge.

Another quick look round. Patrick blew the chalk dust off his right sleeve and departed with an air of serenity about him, just as the yes-father Pio would have done, had he selected the same door to show off his spelling.

Patrick was, of course, late for his Scripture class, but on Tuesdays they were doing revision, from the very beginning all over again, so he entered the Garden of Eden just in time. And the yes-father with glasses didn’t scold him; he merely pressed the book he was holding against his white robe and asked Patrick to read that bit where Adam is giving names to the animals in his private zoo. The class didn’t expect a great performance, and nobody took much notice of his eh-eh-ehs, though in fairness to the print of the book Patrick found the words winking at him, as if he and they had met before.

Suddenly, there were more words, over the lines and below, trying to get in, and Patrick seemed to recognize them without any difficulty whatsoever. Now his voice rose up confidently, and he proceeded to read about Adam teaching the cocks how to jump on the hens, telling the poodle which arse-hole he should sniff at, and soon everybody copulated and pissed with everybody under the sun.

The class was spellbound and very quiet, then a neighing sort of noise broke out.

Patrick was being laughed at: the entire class loved him in unison. He sat down, exhausted. Silence returned and like dust was settling on his desk and the open textbook.

It was only then that the yes-father found his lost voice and piped towards the ceiling:

‘No, no, no!’

The principal yes-father didn’t kiss Patrick on the head. He mumbled something about not being able to reach Patrick’s father by telephone, and also about a letter in the post. During the twenty years under his guidance, St. Patrick’s School had fumigated many filthy minds, but Patrick’s filth was beyond any demucking measure. However, he wanted to know one thing.

‘Who taught you those horrible words!’ But Patrick wasn’t going to be a puky squealer, especially now that the principal had told him they couldn’t possibly keep him at St Patrick’s. ‘Give me his name.’

‘Yes, father,’ Patrick said, ‘it’s Boris.’

‘Boris who?

‘My brother. He teaches me things, yes-father.’

At home, Dolly-mum was kindness itself. She took him for a brisk walk round Prince Albert’s Memorial, and this time Patrick didn’t call him the Blessed Albert.

‘It’s just as well you’re out of their clutches. They put too much sin into your innocent head. And it’s the fault of your dad, who is a snob. Do you know what he said?

He said it’s quite all right socially to be a backward Catholic. Mind you, I don’t want you ever to resent your dad. Father and son should be like chums to each other, but really what’s so smart about having a religious background?’

That night Patrick didn’t sleep at Dolly-mum’s house. He waited hours for the last train to pass the Underground station, from which he was to begin his nocturnal exploration. A torch-lamp weighed his pocket down. He saw a man in uniform approach.

‘That’s the piss boy,’ one of them had said when he once peeped into the side entrance at Sloane Square. And they had chased him out like a dog. Now he heard a quiet voice which didn’t frighten him at all.

‘Waiting for your mum, sonny? Shall I help you to find her?’

‘Oh, no, sir, it’s Boris. He’s just coming. And thank you, sir.’

‘You’re a polite boy,’ said the man and walked away.

Patrick saw the lights in the tunnel change from red to green.

Sky

1

And the Sky Man put the animals between me and my husband.

I know my age by my children. Nineteen children ago, we were living just beneath him in the treeland that must have been afloat between two skies, because I still remember the roots of the thickest trees dipped in the rain clouds on which we could walk then without falling down. And I remember the animals which had wings to protect us and themselves against the light, for the light was always burning in the hands of the Sky Man, one in his day hand and the other in his night hand. With both he struck us, and put the animals between me and my husband.

The animals with wings are now smaller and have timid eyes; they wash their feathers in the sky all day and hide in the rocks after dusk; I never see them walk with their wings spread out, flapping the air and turning the shadows around me. I walk between my cedar tree and my lake alone, unattended; the animals step aside from the paths I choose, even when I have to cross the shadow circles which are crowded with their young. They multiply and will multiply, because the Sky Man put them in our place, and handed the dominion over the surface of the earth to their mute breed. They prowl around my home on dark nights before a storm, but none of them, even the hissing cat, would know how to attack us when we are unprotected by our eyes in sleep. And we have lightning and thunder on our side.

My eyes reflect in the water like the green jewels on the dragon’s fins: I am afraid to stare into the reflection for long, because I might lose power over my body and drown in my own eyes. Once I crouched to pick snails from the reeds and a water animal, spiked with big red bones, slid out of the slime and crushing the reeds, came close to me. My eyes were at the same height as his, and he was stupid to look at me. I did nothing. I only held my glare, and his wet eyes without any hairs around them tried to close and couldn’t.

Tears dribbled from them, larger and thicker, then he fell to the side, his red bones cutting the reeds as his whole body shook, trying to slide back into the slime. I bent over him and watched his eyes. Now they didn’t move: the water animal was blind. And I despised him, as I despise all the mute breed on land and in water.

Only the serpents have eyes that cannot be harmed by mine, yet they slither away from my echoes, because they know me by the sound of my feet. And I, too, feel their wriggling presence about me in the grass as I wade through it, marking the beginning of a new path. Some trees still bow before me; like the dragons they are old enough to remember the two skies and the rain clouds at their roots. And if I lie asleep in the grass, one of the old trees always stands in attendance, and the animals keep at a distance, watching how it twists and unfolds its arms.

My son told me after a hunt that he could have killed the whole herd of them, so heavy they were and so unable to run; and the tree, my son said, walked in a circle while I slept. Did I dream then, he asked me, because only my dreams could make the ancient race of the forest turn on their roots in the light of day. He was afraid of his dreams, and I had none since his birth, ten children ago. No, I didn’t see a dream, I told him, it was the grass that must have reminded the tree of its ancient duty. My son kissed the edge of my hair and kissing it touched my hip with his hand. If only I could call a dream that had an obedient touch on its fingers. The touch of the grass on awaking was like a voice. Could I tell him more? That I longed to hear my name spoken aloud, spoken in a whisper, it could even be a humming sound, no higher than the blades of grass, passed from butterfly to butterfly, and scented by the fallen scales of pine-cones.

My seventh son, born ten children ago, must be afraid of my name. He said it once in his sick sleep, but it was a cry thrown down a cliff into a dark cave from which no echoes come. I call him Amo, against the wish of my husband who is the maker of names; I don’t want to remember the name he gave Amo after his birth, which was the most painful of them all. Amo, you are Amo, you are my pain and my touch, and my resolution. On the day you find enough strength in your tongue to utter my name, it will be heard by every beast and every plant, and repeated from forest to forest, from lake to lake.

Without hearing the sound that belongs to me I feel that my body belongs to me less; and this must be age, nameless in growing separate. My husband’s age also appears to me through separation, and so I see his name growing apart from his body. He only comes to my house when a new birth is due, he stays to beget another child and then leaves me by the shore of this lake. What age and what separation does he take from me to keep in his memory while he wanders under the changing moons, between the homesteads of our own breed? He knows his paths as I know mine, and around him there are the beaten tracks, wide and many, of the wordless multitudes. How can he believe that man and beast must remain friends?

The other day a bird, violet and yellow, followed me to the house. It flew about the roof, as if choosing a place for its nest, nibbled at the leaves which were still green in the plaited twigs, then perched itself on the ram’s horn and made me laugh when the ram began to leap and turn round. The bird didn’t fall but cleaned its hooked beak on the horn, pecking the ram whenever it tried a higher jump. Amo heard my laughter, got up from the pile of skins he had been preparing for the winter and now stood facing me.

‘You have light in your eyes.’ He spoke in a voice, timid at first, as was his habit.

‘Such light gives you the sky’s own beauty.’ He bent and kissed my hair.

‘Give the bird a happy name,’ I told Amo, but his lips twitched and came close together. I knew he thought of his father’s right. I took Amo’s hand and walked with him to the circle of stones in the kitchen. Then I looked back.

‘It’s a listening bird,’ I said. ‘Look how it follows us wherever we go, tilting its head this way and that way. You think of a name for him, a name that listens.’

And that night the bird slept near my bed under the image which my husband had drawn on the clay of the wall when the clay was still moist. I woke up just before sunrise.

Not to the clashing of the reeds, not to the clapping of the lake, but to a voice, sharp and screechy, which was opening a word, as if that word were coiled up inside a shell.

‘Bi-rrd, birr-d.’

Our eyes met and his didn’t go blind. They only blinked, became red, and where the colour touched a thick curve, it was already the red of the beak. As I raised myself on my elbows I felt a deep hunger in my belly, which made me forget for a moment that the voice had come out of that beak. But the screeching started once more inside it and I could hear almost clearly:

‘Am birrd, yourr birrd.’

‘No bird speaks,’ I whispered.

The sun glow divided the colours on his feathers and they seemed to spark whenever the bird shifted his wings, violet over yellow, black across yellow and violet.

‘Learrnt speechch from shshee.’ Listening to him I didn’t know which shimmered more: his words or his feathers.

‘She—who is she!’

‘Shshee iss you.’

I was tempted to ask the next question, for I felt, as I had once felt, nineteen children ago, that no question could come alone and go alone.

‘You know my name, listening bird!’

‘Yess, yess.’ The wings flapped, out of the sun glow and in again. ‘Learrning speechch, learrning yourr ssound.’

‘Don’t utter it, bird. It will kill you.’

‘Ee-vve,’ he screeched into the silence of my house, ‘Ee-vve.’ Neither the first sound choked the bird to death, nor the second. And echoes lost both soon in the clay-muted corner beyond my son’s bedding. A shadow stirred above it. This time a question had to pass between our mouths.

‘Who was talking with you?’

‘The listening bird, my son.’

Amo didn’t answer that it was impossible for birds to talk, he rose, looked into every corner and then, leaning through the window, watched the sky.

‘The bird is gone: he said. ‘But the clouds are foaming over the lake. I can smell rain.’

I knew what he was thinking then, for he had seen with me the fever and the stomach sickness of the earth after rainfall.

‘Birds smell it sooner than we do.’

He nodded to my words.

2

I hate the Sky Man when he is nothing but the sky. He will suffocate us with his plants, mushrooms and moss before the hooves of his multiplying beasts trample our breed into this fertile mud. What else is he keeping in readiness under the ground? How many more times must his sky fall upon us, so that his slow strangulation will be complete to his revengeful joy? But the Sky Man will never hear a cry from me, the woman whom he mocks through my husband’s stupid mouth as the mother of the earth.

Mother: I would vomit with all my entrails to feel the birth pangs of those slimy pods tearing up the surface as soon as the rain sinks into it. I would bite my own womb with the thorns of the rose bush, if the leaves and the petals that get drunk with rain-water whimpered their love to me. The trees are different, they have pride and age; and whenever they bow before me as they all used to, I understand the sacred sound of my name. The trees remember. They once shared with us their infancy and their silent innocence. But one day the sky and the earth might both open wide in one gasp to smash and suck in the crowns, the trunks, the roots, the whole ancient colonnade erected between the two heavens when the heavens were young and joined in matrimony.

The storm last night overturned the cedar which I had chosen as the landmark for all my paths when the house was only a circle on the ground, nothing else. Now the cedar fell, its roots broke and showed the clods of black earth they were still clutching; and I wanted to pull down the walls of my home so that they could grip something harder.

Amo was on all fours, like a beast, chasing the growing lichen out of the doorway, hitting and squashing the popping heads of mushrooms.

‘The roof is all tangled hair, mother, even the long beams are sprouting green wisps. Stalks, twigs, leaves, buds—everything, mother, is moving and crackling.’

‘Get up, stand on your legs, Amo, you’re not a sniffing animal. Climb on to that roof. Plants won’t eat you, my son, you’re not an insect.’

Amo climbed up. His own black hair became entangled in the green tentacles and he kept banging his head with his right fist, with his left clung to a piece of wood inside the leafy, wet swarm. Suddenly, he thought of something else, let his legs go as far as the stone barring the entrance and stood again on the ground.

‘I’ll get some sedge and a handful of mint-herbs, spread them well across the roof, and the big leaf-eaters will fly in, mother, so many of them that they’ll do my work before the sun touches this stone.’

Amo was right, and the leaf-eaters came as if summoned by his hunting yell. Yes, my seventh son had a quick mind and knew the habits of hunters, whether they ran their prey down for the kill or ate it alive on the spot, still growing at their mouth. When the earth had dried near the house by noon, I burnt the lichen up to the stone gate, lit another fire in the midst of mushrooms and their stench drove away the crawlers with hairy horns and leaping eyes. Then I lay down behind the trunk of the fallen cedar and put my arm on it in the gesture of a wedded woman. I rested with my tree though the tree was dead and showing its roots to the sun, which would strip them to the smooth whiteness of bone.

Amo was now in his flat twin boat on my lake, hunting the hunters of the water.

In daylight and in darkness, in rain and after the storm, I had my tenth child with me; and the Sky Man couldn’t take away the promise he had given my husband that my womb would bear children until my death. For the Sky Man’s promise was always his law and he obeyed himself in his law from the beginning.

‘Eeve, your birrd.’ He was perched on a twig of the cedar, his feathers casting yellow and violet specks on the bark below. I wasn’t surprised at his return. The bird’s voice, however, sounded different, more clear and more human. Perhaps the hot rain had washed the beak and melted the screech inside it. He still lingered over my name, opening it like a long-lipped flower.

‘Birrd brings Eeve guest.’

‘Which of my sons has come to visit me!’ I knew that it couldn’t be any of my twelve daughters: they were too tired, too busy giving birth to child after child since their own childhood. They had neither my strength nor shape to walk great distances after so much pain.

‘Son, no. Bird iss with treeman.’

‘Who’s the treeman!’ I was up on my feet, looking around.

‘Your bird has masster.’

‘Show me your master, listening bird.’

The visitor showed himself. He jumped down from a palmtree which now seemed much higher because the cedar was no longer there to extol its own splendour. The creature had very long arms and short legs which he tried to keep unbent but couldn’t.

His small eyes shifted with great speed: they were everywhere on my body, but when I stared back, they ran like mice to their nests. The bird flew up and sat on the ape’s head.

‘Am treeman,’ he spoke his name through the bird’s beak. ‘Man,’ the bird said as if! didn’t understand. I laughed and it was a noisy laughter because the listening bird flapped his wings, the yellow feathers suddenly aglow over the treeman’s forehead. The small eyes were twice shut, for the hair covered them from above.

‘He can’t stand up on his legs, bird.’

‘I can,’ the bird answered for him and the treeman had another try, but his knees needed a prop in front. Now his right arm, now his left touched the ground. He jerked them upwards each time.

‘You’re cheating,’ I said. Since the bird was his voice, I spoke to the ape as if he could understand me. Perhaps he did. ‘Try your eyes on my eyes and you’ll be blinded like a wabbly water-pig.’

‘Can see through eyelids.’ The listening bird at once carried his thought to me. At that moment 1 saw that his eyelids were still hidden under his forehead hair.

‘You’re cheating again.’

‘No. Treeman sees through leaves.’

He amused me. I wished Amo were with me to be amused, too. But the lake hid its best fish many oar strokes from the reeds. I heard the treeman’s bird speaking my thought:

‘Your son on your lake. Eeve alone without man.’

My pride took its power from being alone. A circle smaller than the lake, my husband had once said, and yet a true circle enclosed within itself.

‘Can you draw a circle, ape?’ I wanted to see its teeth naked in anger.

‘Ape?’ There was a screech audible in the repetition. ‘Tree man is ape’s own word. I think words.’ He made a big round gesture with his arms; it wasn’t a sign of anger, but a circle drawn in the air. His eyes glittered as the sun forced his whole face to open up skyward.

‘What do you want, treeman?’

‘Bring peace.’

‘My husband talks of peace. You are not like him.’

‘Adam-man is man from sky,’ the beaky screech answered.

‘No, no! He’s not the Sky Man!’ I cried out of despair or a long-forgotten fright.

‘Treeman brings himself to woman. Eeve is not strong without Treeman’s army.’

‘Where is your army?’

‘In trees, Eeve. We conquered trees.’

I looked at the fallen cedar and his eyes followed mine. The bird was now hovering over the broken roots, a voice feathered with colours, or a pair of wings, suspended on sound and tuned to yellow and violet.

Then the treeman told me about three of my daughters living with his kind and bearing children of the trees. Theirs was the dominion over the forests, now and in the future, and the tree tops were their thrones. The breed of the man from the sky, he said, would never be large in number and strong enough to create their kingdom on earth. The animals and the plants had the sun and the rain clouds on their side: they sucked the juice of fertility from both. Your grand-daughters will empty their wombs before the tenth child, Eve, and who in the next generations will inhabit those low earth-mounds you built for yourselves wherever you sleep. They are homes, I said, and no son of man will ever live with a she-ape in her tree nest. Wait, he answered, till all your women go to mate with the treemen, and then where will your sons spend their seed?

‘In earth, in earrth, in . . .’ the beaky screech went on and on. I had to cover my ears not to hear any more of it, and tried to punish him with a blinding gaze. But the treeman’s eyes were safe inside two hairy caves, under his forehead wisps.

‘Treeman has Eeve speech, Treeman thinks Eeve, Treeman wants. . . .’ The voice was still coming through my fingers. I felt a weight on my right shoulder and sent my hand there. It touched a soft thing, warm as the hollow of a nest. I screamed, heard my own noise before his, and then a wing brushed my face, scratching the skin under my eye.

Now the bird was flying around the ape’s head, faster and faster, and the head moved too, turning itself dizzy. He couldn’t pretend any longer about standing upright. The long arms dropped and trailed in front of the bending legs.

‘Go! jump! fly! go!’ The hooked beak was all colour, red with panic. The bird had stopped speaking for the treeman: he was shrieking and fluttering for his own sake. What had he seen in the distance that made him so frantic?

‘Go-oo—shshsh—chtcht!’ The listening bird couldn’t shape human words any more, my speech had left him for good or for this darkening moment of fright.

They departed as they had come, suddenly, the ugly toes of the treeman splitting the bark as he clambered the palm-tree, a mock-ape and a mock-male.

Then the air seemed empty of motion. A hush fell on the shadows. Each time this happened, it surprised me anew, sending my eyes to the sky for the signs of a whirlwind on its way. Then I knew. And again the animals reminded me of his near presence by their behaviour. I walked to the stone gate, stepped on the plank over the ditch that Amo had dug out before the last torrent, and stood in the meadow by the path leading to my lake.

And they stood, watching. Lions, giraffes, elephants, spiked eels, water-pigs and the ancient dragons with jewels on their fins. He had light steps, but they heard each of them and moved aside to make room for him. Whichever animal he passed, he touched its head between the eyes, and blessed the eyes, the head and the whole body. The tall beasts with swaying necks held them down in readiness for that sacred gesture.

Such a moment, only a moment like this brings tears to my eyes, as if the useless tears could shed the feeling of loss.

3

‘Do you see much change in me?

We always ask each other the same unimportant question. I mean my age, growing older and riper for death while he, I think, means his kind of change which makes us both separate, less knowing and more thinking.

‘No, Eve, you still have the sky reflected in your beauty.’ His answer was the same. But he meant more than my son Amo who saw in me the light of that sky which stood over his head, not the earlier sky. To my husband I reflected the beauty that had belonged to us both and in spite of the change and the loss, could shine through my features.

‘You walk with shorter steps, Adam.’ But he knew I was looking at his grey hair and thinking of the stoop, not the length of steps. And he wouldn’t grow a beard, unlike his sons and grandsons; it was his mouth, bare, with no hair above or below, that the animals watched with awe. It spoke human sounds and it could also make silent movements which each of them understood. The beards muffled the silent words for the animals, or perhaps these were only beards to cover up what the lips couldn’t do.

I counted my ages by my children. And how old was he, the name-maker, the begetter, the man from the sky to the tree-ape, and the hunter who never killed to my seventh son, the beast killer?

Our father has counted all my ages.’ He knew my thoughts whenever he wanted to know them. And he always called the Sky Man ‘Our father.’

‘Do you see him? It didn’t sound right. ‘Does he show himself to Adam?’

‘No. He speaks to me. Sometimes.’

‘Where?’

‘I can’t tell.’ My husband’s blue eyes became lost in their own colour, no longer his, but wider and deeper, ready for a descent of appearances. ‘I can’t, Eve. 1 don’t remember.’

I wished his eyelids would close to give him a healing shade, but I had to watch his face until my next question hit it hard. What would his lips do—twitch? open? let the tongue out?

‘Does the Sky Man know that three of my daughters are wifed to the treemen?’

‘He knows.’ Every wrinkle in that large and changeable face seemed darker with pain, but the lips remained calm. ‘And there are no treemen, Eve. I named them apes in their beginning.’

‘Is he against my daughters?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You could gather all your sons and kill the treemen who defile my daughters?’

His answer had the music that didn’t belong to his voice:

‘This I say, you shall not kill.’ He got up, his grey head almost touching a bough in the roof. ‘I shall not kill,’ he said in his usual tone.

Then something pierced a thought deep under my skull. It felt like being touched by lightning. Was he telling me where my secret thought lay, or was he receiving it from me, despite myself?

‘That’s why I have come to your land,’ he said.

‘It’s mine and Amo’s.’

‘That’s why I have come. But Amo is no name. I called him after his dead brother, so that the sound which was killed might live again in him.’

‘I will never call him Abel.’

Neither did my husband use that name when talking to Amo. He called him nothing. This was the first time I noticed fear in his manner of speech. Why not say simply: my son? And Amo, too, treated his father as if he had no name, no memories to share, but were a breed by itself, some odd creature from the sky, just as the treeman said.

Yet they talked together of this and that. Was the lake a lake or a sea? It might be worth trying to cross it by boat. Why couldn’t we keep more cattle? What did the last herd die of? Now and again my husband sounded like a tired name-maker who had to repeat aloud his bits of knowledge so that he wouldn’t lose them before passing them on safely into our heads. And he also echoed himself from that earlier likeness which was as faint as music between the skies.

You shall not punish those you cannot judge, you shall not kill those you cannot bring to life; you shall not, shall not, you, you. This was Adam talking to Adam, Adam thinking of Adam, knowing Adam. He shut us off, he exhausted our listless minds with that voice in the likeness of the voice. Then at last I heard silence, and after the silence Amo’s words even more soothing than silence.

‘Teach me to draw a spiky eel, a giant beaver, a dragon too, I will have them on the wall and many others besides, when I build a new wall along the lake against the creatures of the slime.’

‘I don’t know how to make drawings.’ He hesitated and, again, the name of Abel couldn’t leave his mouth. ‘But this full moon inside a ring, you drew it yourself, I was told you did.’

‘Yes, it’s true. But first there was a command in my understanding. I had to put the same sign in every home my children were to build.’

‘Is it against the evil stare of the moon? An eye in another eye?’

‘They are not eyes. Circle is their name. One inside the other.’

‘A big circle and a small circle,’ Amo said and laughed.

‘Yes, the inner circle is just as round as the one outside.’

And he began to speak about his ‘Our father’, the Sky Man, whose image sometimes appeared in the likeness of two circles, although there was yet another, and this third circle could not be understood by man until it became visible and until man broke it with his own weak hands. Amo listened and smiled. His thoughts went in circles, too, trying to catch a few of his father’s words, but I felt how dizzy they were. I was standing near my son, sure that we could never grow separate, because my husband had already put himself beyond Amo’s reach. Yet Amo wanted to learn at least about drawing a small thing like that circle inside.

‘And could I make this one myself, on the wet clay, with a long, sharp nail!’ He showed all his fingers, expecting his father to choose one of them.

‘Yes, you could, Abel.’ The name seemed to spill blood as it opened an old scar in both of us. ‘Because, Abel my son, the inner circle is what has to be filled or emptied inside you.’

‘Is the circle then mine just like a boat, a spear or Damo the dog (‘ He mentioned his dog, though it had been kicked to death by a bison, long ago.

‘Yes, it’s yours. And when the circle coils itself up Our father will dwell in the centre of the coil.’

‘Is the Sky Man no bigger than a snail? I thought he was very very big.’

My husband didn’t answer. He took Amo’s hand and then mine, and joined them together.

‘This is your mother Eve,’ he said to Amo, ‘This is your son Abel,’ he said to me.

And I trembled at the foreknowledge within the warning that his words enclosed, a condemned circle inside a noose of a circle.

There was one more joining of hands on my husband’s departure. The listening bird caused this, unwittingly. With his beak glistening through the feathery palm leaves he must have spied on us for a long while before he dared to drop his disrespectful cry:

‘Aadam and Eeve, Aadam and Eeve.’

And my husband, without looking up at the caller, took both my hands, held them in a firm grip, himself rooted to the earth like a tree. We were poised for the clouds, the plants and the beasts to see us as we were in the beginning, a coupled life, a dance in a still moment, a deathless peace. The bird seemed frightened by what he had done and hid his beak farther in the branches.

‘It’s the listening bird, Adam. He says he’s learnt speech from me.’

‘The parrot!’ My husband let a smile raise his heavy lips, and the smile vanished at once. ‘It’s already named. So much life is named. It saddens me.’

‘The parrot, I remember now. Why didn’t I remember it on that day?’

‘He’s the great liar of the forest. He goes everywhere, listens to what is being said, repeats the words he understands and those he doesn’t understand, and in the end ties them all up into lies with his clever red beak.’

‘But the parrot spoke our true names.’

‘Yes, he said our names.’ And the warm strength of my husband was flowing from his hand into mine in the likeness of begetting which I knew hadn’t been meant for this time.

I complained, of course, about the animals. That was usual on our partings. They were pushing us out, I said, multiplying to please their lust, feeding on our lands, and only sometimes paying a small homage to Adam. Why, why was it said that we owned the earth! They possessed it with their greedy snouts, their hooves, their defiant tails.

Either we killed the beasts, hunting them in the grass and in the trees, or they would hunt us down when we became weak in our children. We needed a new breed of men, ferocious and ruthless.

As usual, Adam answered with silence. And as usual, animals waited for his blessing at the boundaries of my homestead.

The night swelled up after his departure, pregnant with thunder. Sweat was pouring down Amo’s thighs as I looked at them, saying through my desire:

‘I know you’re not afraid. I’ll take you back into my body. For this was meant.

You knew it in your touch, your fingers, Amo.’

Amo was rubbing his right arm where the fox’s teeth left a scar, his back bent and touching the wall. When both his arms stretched out, I saw that he was leaning against the place marked with a double circle.

Book Two

Surface

1

‘We’re not allowed to see death,’ I said and covered my eyes. But 1 had seen the heads, and if they were drowned and now merely touching the surface of the water, I could not erase the sight by rubbing my eyelids. Either I was already a contaminated witness of death, and the others had shared the experience with me, or there was nothing to fear, and death had no dominion over us now as under the domes before.

I opened my eyes and saw that none of them had listened to my warning. We all, in fact, had our eyes fixed on the heads, hoping perhaps that some might turn round and look at us. That would be a sort of answer.

‘If I should die,’ Joker intoned, ‘bury me underground. I don’t want to be afloat.’

‘I wonder,’ Sailor put on his best faraway look. ‘Did they teach me how to swim when we were living down below, me and Joke?’

‘Things. Things that keep coming back to me. . . .’ Joker’s moon face was in full ascent. ‘I think there was a pond on the other side of time and I sat in a blue plastic saucer. A cat came along and asked for milk.’

‘You know what, Dover. . . .’ Leeds sounded knowing and his arm lay with weighty confidence on September’s shoulder. ‘The road to the tree has been paved for us.

All we have to do is to step on those heads.’

‘Oh, no!’ I heard Rain.

‘In the stampede style, Dover, if you see what I mean.’

‘It’s like swimming with both feet on the surface,’ Sailor said and Joker nodded.

They were both prepared to follow Leeds and I didn’t expect September would linger behind them. What was I to do? Stay with Rain? try another route or back out altogether.

‘Funny, the light . . .’ someone whispered and I couldn’t recognize the voice broken off by fear.

‘We’re going blind.’ Rain was now close to my ear. ‘You were right, Dover, we shouldn’t have looked.’

The last thing I saw was Leeds’s neck straining its sinews in all directions to inform us in time how deadly that death of ours was going to be. Then the neck, the rock, the still horror in the water, everything switched off in a second. From the dark two female hands grabbed me.

‘The circle! We must make a circle.’

‘Get hold of my belt,’ I answered Rain’s cry. ‘The hooks !’ But my brothers, who had more practice in finding the hooks, were already at my side, then Leeds fell in, pulling September with him. Their voices came after the touch, identifying each grip as it tightened.

‘Rain, where are you?’

‘My feet are sinking into the sand. I can’t move, Dover.’

At that moment the whole sky rushed to free my eyes. It glittered with stars, it foamed downwards in white streaks, it chased the slender moon on the water. Clouds of scent broke with the waves, then almost hurt in the nostrils. The noise, too, seemed to push and bruise. More sky, more scent. And our circle split at its joints. Joker and Sailor were lying on their hacks, unable to turn over. The light from the open sky seemed to nail them to the ground. Leeds and September had fallen on the prostrated body of Rain. Neither of them could move.

‘Rain! Rain! Rain!’ I shouted again and again, thinking that s he was the first of us doomed to die.

‘She’s warm,’ Sailor answered me. ‘I am trying to get up. She’s trying, too. It’s no use.’

‘What is the sky gaping like that for?’ Joker said and then kicked the air with both his feet. ‘It should be asleep at night. I don’t like the look of it, do you, Sailor?’

‘When I get up I’ll tell you, not now.’ And to his own surprise, he got up and didn’t say a thing. With his hand at the level of his eyebrows, he was now scrutinizing the state of nautical affairs. Quite inaudibly, he muttered something long about the tree and the heads, then sighed and picked up his brother from the ground. Nothing else could be got out of Sailor, I knew that, for, faithful to his habits, he linked arms with Joker and both were sound asleep in a couple of minutes.

The moon chase on the sea continued, making it impossible for me to distinguish either the rock or the heads paving the way to it. I had forgotten about Rain who needed help, as I had forgotten about death and our momentary blindness. Instead, a new sensation took possession of my mind. I could only think of food. Where would I find it, how would it taste when found? Should I dig for it or dive into the sea, or beg the starlit air to fill my stomach? Like my brothers and my wives, like Leeds my would-be kinsman, I must have been overwhelmed by hunger and sudden sleep.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in my circle, standing, of course, as the custom and necessity demanded. And the hollow of hunger was gone. I felt I had eaten during my sleep.

‘They were juicy, weren’t they?’ said Joker, rubbing his eyes with his own and Sailor’s hand, for the circle kept revolving and we were all linked together. I noticed Rain on my right.

‘Fell straight into our yawning mouths, didn’t they, those flakes?’ Joker nodded to Sailor in solemn appreciation. Then September spoke, all gratitude and wonder, but in a calm unhurried voice:

‘I can see the last of the domes receding.’ Yes, it was still visible, a green line, immersed in clouds at one end. ‘They came at dawn, you know, as far as the sea-shore, and one of them, the blue dome, opened just over my head. I hadn’t slept, not even for an hour, I must have expected them without thinking. I don’t know why. They did come, you see.’

‘Yes, my dear,’ Leeds had to give her and us his official confirmation. ‘As I always say, we are being well looked after, remarkably well judging by the recent events.

There isn’t and there never was a serious food shortage over this happy island. I once worked out the actual rate of flake-fall per second and per head, but I wouldn’t dream of tiring you with statistics. Nothing builds confidence better than confidence inside the tum.’ His belly received a few pats and the congratulating hand returned to our circle.

‘Tum-turn-tum.’ Both my wives laughed with him. ‘Now let’s cross the quaint head bridge, shall we, my sweet ladies.’

Leeds pulled a really stupid face as he said this, for there were no heads in the water. Nothing floated between the sea-shore and the rock, and the rock itself had a belt of haze at the top. We couldn’t be sure, not even Sailor, that the tree was still there.

Perhaps they took the poor little tree with them, Joker said, but none of us felt like speculating further, because it would have meant deciding who those ‘they’ were-the heads or the domes.

For some reason, difficult to explain, my thoughts detached the domes from the skymen, as previously I had tried to accept the floating heads apart from the bodies which must have supported them from below.

‘I think I’d like to swim,’ Sailor announced, and waited for Joker to give him a push.

‘How far does one drown, if there’s two of us, Sailor?’

‘Only that far, up to your cat’s whiskers,’ Sailor answered and this time he pushed his brother out of the circle. Leeds called after them: ‘Brave lads! That’s the spirit. I’ll give a big yell if you get too far off your course, so keep your ears dry.’

Sailor entered the sea at the point where the brown weeds formed a floating ring.

Joker stepped right into it. We saw their heads close to each other, two hairy bubbles, now large now very small, then they seemed to knock at the waves, two quick knocks at a time, finally they vanished.

‘Shall I give them a big yell now, Dover?’

‘They’re on course, Leeds.’ I thought the tip of the rock emerged for a moment, but the sunlight was in my eyes. ‘Or they have sunk,’ I added, without meaning to upset the women. Rain and September grew pale, and Rain, who now trusted her movements more than her words, flapped both arms in imitation of Sailor’s first gesture on entering the water.

‘I wish we had made use of those heads yesterday,’ said Leeds. ‘Ah, how very obliging! there they are again.’ I couldn’t, of course, twist my neck as well as he could operate his turret, but 1 certainly tried, and noticed nothing resembling the horror we had seen. Only something like a dark line shifted on the sea surface, and once again the light of the sun confused me.

It was September who decided to see for herself. She believed everything Leeds chose to tell us from his turret heights, and seemed eager to prove that she did. Now she rushed towards the shore, and I marvelled at both her resolution and the strength of her knees. They didn’t weigh her down. Neither did her hands need a support. Strange that we should have crawled on all fours not so long ago.

Leeds was a master of indirect experience: he preferred to learn from September’s risk. Admittedly, I also stayed behind, being, as it appeared, responsible for my less irresponsible wife.

Standing near the patch of weeds, September bent and lifted something from the water.

‘Clever girl,’ Leeds said over my head, ‘she needs so little guidance, doesn’t she!

A mere hint is enough for a wife of her potentials. We can be truly proud of her, Dover, I mean the two of us.’ I disliked his obvious familiarity. Then he stepped between me and Rain, and took our hands. ‘Let’s go!’ He squeezed my wrist. ‘We must see what the clever girl has found down there.’

Very carefully, eyeing us both in turn, Leeds moved his feet forward. We were slow in arriving, but when we reached September, she stood with a wet rope in her hand, watching the heads of Sailor and Joker out in the sea, safely above the water.

‘Someone untied the rope at this end, that’s why we couldn’t get hold of it at the start. And Joker thought it was a long piss tube, the longest that ever ran away to sea.’

Sailor had much to tell us after emerging from his natural element. And he looked most virile with all those muscles glistening in the sun.

‘The heads, you know. . . .’ Joker began and immediately grabbed Sailor by the leg to keep himself steady as he came out. ‘They sure tried to hang on to that thing, but you can’t swim with your teeth biting ropes in the water, can you now!’

‘What is it attached to at the other end?’ I asked him.

‘To the tree.’ Sailor answered for his brother.

‘There isn’t anything else on the rock.’

‘Perhaps they wanted to pull it out with all the roots.’ Rain was speaking of the vanished heads, and a moment later I saw pain in the corners of her mouth as she observed her own feet pressing against the wet sand.

2

Even my two wives found the crossing easy. The moon had paved our way: the tide was at its lowest and the rope at its straightest. We could see it ahead of us, touched up with silver and almost resting on its own reflection. The moon also showed bits of rock sticking out from the shallow waters. Joker and Sailor kept the conversation going by reminding each other how very dangerous it all was the other day, though they had swum as if it wasn’t in the least dangerous.

Leeds boasted from time to time that he could, of course, have carried September on his back and Rain in his arms, had the water been higher, but in fact he wanted us to wade on in a sort of circle, three on this side and three on the other side of the rope.

Before the crossing he had made quite a fuss about the knots: would they withstand the pressure? who would dive in an emergency to retrieve the sinking rope? and so on. Soon, however, I heard his belly rumble, and Leeds listened to his own music, first with curiosity, then with concern. Even his neck stooped and stayed like that, which was an unusual sight.

I must have been the last to pass out on reaching our destination, for I later had a vague memory of Sailor quarrelling with Joker over our exact whereabouts, and of Rain kneeling in the sand, with her arms up. Whether the others had lost consciousness like me or merely slept I couldn’t make out from their gestures and snippets of monologue.

Everybody became talkative and jumpy, even Rain, who would suddenly remember her kneeling posture only to abandon it in the next minute for a giggly chatter. I, too, found myself exchanging silly laughs with Leeds, who got stuck in one honey-coated phrase and couldn’t pull his tongue out of it.

‘My dear fellow, my sweet dear friend, the best brother-in-law a lawyer could ever have, how my heart beats and bleats for you, because you’re such a darling curly lamb, pure wool, pure honey. My dear fellow, my dear sweet . . .’ and the whole thing oozed again out of his mouth.

Very likely, I repaid him in kind, with rotating compliments, but I only seemed to be working on my grins.

‘Real rain doesn’t what?’ September asked herself, puzzled and provocative.

‘Real baby doesn’t stain, is that how it goes? Dover, Dover, do remember to lie over my September. Leeds on Rain grinds with pain. Remember, remember: what’s there to remember?’

‘Things that keep coming back . . .’ Joker nudged his brother. ‘Remember, Sailor, how they packed us into those Underground trains, from June to September, or the other way round! Going round underground, from Leeds to London, from class to class, always on the rails, jog-jog-jog, green turns to red, or the other way round. Mobile education, in the Tube from the tubes. Remember, Sailor, those other tubes! I wish I could have one now to spend a penny. What’s a penny, Sailor! Things always coming back from down below. And you hung my cat, you know.’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t!’ Sailor broke into Joker’s monologue. ‘I don’t remember travelling with your cat on the Inner Circle.’

‘I once carried a pussy asleep in my arms.’ Rain turned towards me. Now all our monologues were crossing one another. Joker picked up his quarrel with Sailor; September tossed rhymes into the air, I congratulated myself with a laugh or two, Rain repeated her old threats that she would change into a tree.

Then like a voice of reason unimpaired by other reasons, Leeds boomed over us all, pointing to a slight silhouette above his own turret of a neck.

‘Now listen! my cousins in motion, my circular fellow-travellers! Observe this tree above you. It is a genuine and unique specimen. It has roots, bark, branches, needles, cones and other natural accessories, all real, fresh, nourished by Mother Earth herself.

This tree, whatever else we may think about it, certainly deserves to be visited on foot, by land and water, as we have done to our undeniable risk and peril. It also deserves to be eaten alive. Let’s enjoy life while it grows, and, to quote my own saying. . . .’

Leeds stopped abruptly because he noticed what we had already noticed, a neat inscription carved at the bottom of the rock. It read: Do not trespass. Place of execution.

There were also some strange characters in two columns on the left of the inscription.

‘It’s in Chinese,’ said Joker.

‘How do you know it’s Chinese?’ Sailor said.

‘How do you know anything?’ Joker replied.

And they went back to their quarrel about the Underground memories from their adolescence.

We were somewhat disappointed that the tree was so fragile, its twigs bowing to every breeze from the sea. It didn’t look edible, no matter what Leeds meant by his rhetorical phrase. Gaping from all sides at this unique specimen of nature, we moved in our habitual manner, the first, the second, the third round and within our encircled space which usually was empty, stood a tree.

I expected Rain at least to display some emotions. Probably, like everyone of us, she felt exhausted after that fever of talking and giggling. Now as I watched her against the light, she seemed almost the size of the tree. This comparison intrigued me, and I waited for Sailor to come up to the level of the tree, so that I could see a real oddity. For he was the tallest in our circle, despite the impression of height Leeds gave with his towering neck.

Before I made my observation, Joker cried out in a very indignant voice: ‘You’re taller than the tree! How can a man be taller than a tree?’

Our circle halted, Sailor standing on a flat mossy boulder and proving the point.

With his mouth wide open, he thought most visibly of a question which would baffle that moon face opposite him. Seconds passed, then minutes. And Leeds, of course, had a brain-wave which turned out to be a mere wave, untouched by the brain.

‘It isn’t a tree, it’s a bush.’

This time Joker became indignant on behalf of his brother.

‘A bush that has grown almost as tall as Sailor can’t be a bush. It’s a proper tree, with cones, resin, fruit and whatever that other thing was we saw long and spiky on the screen, Sailor and me.’

‘I can’t see any fruit.’ I knew that Rain at once regretted saying this. It would have been happier for her to believe in a real rain from the real sky that one day would splutter through these green needles and beget a fruit as big as a babe.

‘That’s funny,’ Sailor grinned at me from the other side of the tree, ‘you can’t hang a man from a tree if he is taller than the tree.’

‘Let’s try and find out,’ Leeds suggested. I laughed with September. Rain was back on her knees, her enormous eyes drawing a darker blue from the branches. She fingered a knot around the trunk which had a surprising thickness at the base. Joker observed her movements with great attention, his legs bent and jerking forward.

‘Very poorly knotted,’ he finally pronounced. ‘That’s why the rope slipped and they lost their heads. That is how it was, wasn’t it, Sailor?’

But I knew that it couldn’t have been like that, because the rope was still attached to the tree and the trunk had passed a remarkable test of endurance. Surely Leeds knew that, he wasn’t a complete fool, yet he patted Joker on the neck and said:

‘Clever lad. Now you’ve got your loop. That’s the end.’ He gave me one of his knowing glances. ‘Don’t you agree, Dover, that in a manner of speaking we are all at the end of our tether?’

Leeds hardly expected an answer, for he turned his back to me, walked up to September, patted her on the head, made an encouraging gesture to Rain, muttered something to Sailor, and generally behaved as if he were in charge of my circle. I couldn’t disguise my anger, but, being a cautious sort of man, I waited for the right remark and the right moment to cut him with it to the quick. But my perfect timing was spoilt by Rain’s hysterical outburst:

‘It’s here! it’s here! It’s been lying in the earth under our feet; and we wouldn’t look. We could have hurt its beautiful skin, we could have squashed it against the rock.’

‘Stop this, Rain!’ I shouted at her, but she smiled in reply and held her hands cupped towards me. Something violet and yellow lay there, an oblong shape narrow at the top.

‘Look, Dover, the fruit of the tree, my tree, look at my beautiful fruit.’ ‘Why did it grow in the earth?’ I said. ‘Fruit should hang from the branches.’

‘Let’s have a bite, each one bite, there should be enough for six bites.’ And before Rain could close her hands, Leeds snatched the fruit from her and attacked it with his teeth. ‘Mium! mium! what a lovely taste. MyoId rumble tum says “mmiumm” to you all.’

I saw Rain stagger and fall to the ground. She bruised her forehead on a stone near the hollow from which she had unearthed her fruit, and blood began to trickle over her lowered eyelids.

I meant to do three things: to knock the brute down, rescue Rain’s fruit and see to her wound. But I did nothing. I couldn’t. From now on, Leeds was the master of the situation, or rather he seemed to rule over the chaos which his first bite had released.

Joker had the second bite, swallowed quickly, and then with his full-moon glare hit Sailor between the eyes. I meant to rush at once to my brothers, yet my very intention paralysed me. I only saw the rope being pulled up from the water and gliding like a wet snake over the boulders and moss.

‘Stop it!’ I shouted but my own voice seemed to mock me. I sounded ineffectual and petulant, an eunuch protesting against violence. For there was a violence of murder and rape in the noises and movements about me, and I could do nothing else but watch them. Joker was pushing Sailor’s neck into a noose, Leeds was copulating with September, who had her teeth plunged in the purple carcass of the fruit.

From inside the noose, quite unaware of what was happening to him, Sailor commented on Leeds’s performance for his brother’s benefit and pleasure.

‘That dog I saw with you on the screen, remember, Joker?—that poodle did it much better. He was faster, wasn’t he?’

And Joker laughed with brotherly appreciation as he was about to give the rope a sudden pull. I didn’t see what exactly followed afterwards.

September lifted her head up and whispered to me:

‘Come here, first husband, and kiss your second wife.’

I obeyed. Her tongue between my lips inserted a morsel which had the vibrant scent of the waves, mixed with her saliva.

‘You swallowed a bite of the fruit, too, Dover. You are one of us now.

Remember, remember, your fruit is September.’

I jumped back and immediately vomited into the sea. Two hard bits fell into my hand as I wiped my mouth.

The moon shone all through the night, while I watched Sailor’s head bobbing on the surface of the water. Someone had to be a listener, so I listened to my brother’s murderer.

‘It was supposed to be a joke. I am Joker, aren’t I?’ And he was supposed to swim well, wasn’t he, Dover? After all, you didn’t call him Sailor for nothing.’

I couldn’t tell him that I had become a name-maker by chance. Besides, my poor mind was trying to work out some complex calculations: how many thoughts had to be twisted to form a noose for each of those thousands of heads we had seen in the water.

3

Leeds had three long branches for breakfast, and even persuaded Joker to nibble at a twig.

‘Amazing how tender these needles are! Not a prick, not a tickle in the throat.

And they positively taste of lobster. They used to have a famous lobster restaurant in Sheffield-that’s near Leeds, you know—in the bad old days, of course. I read about this in a screen micro book. One likes odd bits of information about places close to one’s feet and—shall I say—heart? Now Joker, don’t fret yourself, don’t sulk; what’s done is done.

Besides, one is not supposed to drown with a rope.’ Leeds paused and belched. ‘Look at September. Isn’t she happy! And so pretty after last night. What about having a spot of fun with her, cousin Joker? She wouldn’t mind getting a third husband and a tough chap at that, would you, dear r Leeds turned to September and she sent them a kiss each. ‘You see, the flesh is willing. Good girl. I pronounce you tubby hubby and mousy spousy. Go behind the bush, and have a jolly nice so and so. Ah, there’s hardly any bush left.’ He roared with laughter. ‘We had our fill, didn’t we? Mostly me, to be fair to your delicate stomachs. And Rain, sweet dear Rain, she feeds on pure spirit, diluted in nothing. The dainty darling uses some beauty sleep, though. . . .’

‘Don’t wake her up, Leeds,’ I said, standing over him with both my fists clenched.

In the left I held two seeds, small, very hard, and black. I wanted Rain to have them.

‘Hear, hear, the big sulk himself has spoken at last.’ Leeds felt so confidently in control that he rubbed his nose along my knuckles. And I didn’t even think of punching that mug of his.

My first wife was sleeping with her face to the sky but I didn’t wish to disturb her.

I tried as best I could to stand so that my shadow would always cover her face. If she had a dream then, she probably saw herself lying in the shade of a real tree. What would she say on discovering that it was now merely a skeleton of growth, with a handful of dark green needles scattered around its trunk and over the knot. The rope still lay there, growing from the knot like an uncoiled sea monster. I decided not to remind Rain of Sailor’s death, or disappearance, if that was a better word for it; after all, she might have missed the sight, and today no gruesome head would disturb her. Nothing floated near the rock, nothing farther away.

Sailor had vanished, noose, neck, body and tallness. A complete removal. Such removals: how were they done, and who did them! Perhaps death and burial took place in no place that we knew; perhaps they truly happened beyond our comprehension.

Rain astonished me, and I was sure she also astonished September and Leeds, when finally she rose from under the skeleton of the tree. Her huge eyes threw images at us and lights that must have visited her during the night, and although I felt them reflected in my face as well as in my brain, I had no meaning to give them. September smiled at Rain, not absent-mindedly and not out of superiority, but almost with the courteous apologies due to love from beauty. I waited for the next move from Leeds.

Soon enough he opened his mouth, showed a green needle stuck between his teeth, and as he was about to say something casually offensive, his lips smacked, then smacked again, and he could only make a clumsy bow in the direction of the tree. If that was meant to be an ironic mime, it hadn’t worked at all.

At first Rain was walking in slow circles and examining the wispy bits which remained of the twigs. She said nothing. Then she knelt and covered up the hollow where she had found the one and only fruit. I remembered the two small seeds and tightened my grip. She rose again, looked at the four of us in turn, looked at the white clouds lowered over the coastal zone, and very gently took my left hand. It opened at her touch, the seeds dropped into her palm, but neither Joker who was perched on a high stool-like stone near Leeds peering over September, noticed anything. They all, like myself, hung on Rain’s lips which wouldn’t utter a sound. Only her blue eyes talked and sang.

After a few hours, or maybe longer, I experienced the same curious sense of satiation as when I had awoken after being fed during my sleep. Yet I was on my feet, busy all the time after my own fashion, thinking of our eventual return which had to come-sooner or later. And then what! Back to the congested whirlpool of crowds, back to the land of the hygiene boxes! and my circle, my own small enclosure, what was to become of it!

Again Rain touched my hand, and again I opened it, but there was nothing inside.

‘You are my husband, Dover,’ she said, and I never heard so much clarity in her voice. It seemed to make each word transparent.

‘Yes, I am,’ I said and for a moment was afraid that I might hear a crude laugh behind my back. But Leeds kept quiet.

‘I am your wife, Rain,’ she said.

‘Yes, you are.’

Then it occurred to me that there must have been a purpose in her omission. She didn’t call herself my first wife. I understood the meanings she showed under her translucent words. I wasn’t, however, ready to answer directly with meanings. Gestures intervened, as usual, a finger placed on a finger, a shoulder raised, a prolonged nod.

Nodding came easy, it was a flexible sort of intervention which didn’t intervene too pointedly. I found myself nodding right and left, but the reason for it lay in my reluctance to look straight into Rain’s speech.

I was therefore glad whenever she approached September, as she did surprisingly often that day and the day after. 1 overheard them on one occasion. They were alone.

Both Leeds and Joker had gone down to the edge of the water, to relieve themselves no doubt, and to search for crabs and snails. Leeds had new ideas about eating.

‘We won’t cross the Safety Zone,’ Rain was saying, ‘we must stay in it as long as is necessary for you.’

‘I am afraid of the Safety Zone.’

‘Fear will be smaller when you yourself grow bigger with the child, September.

You mustn’t let them take it away from you through one of their boxes. Your child will live on the surface.’

‘But, Rain, Rain, it may become a cheating pain of birth, another wriggling on the ground, another gnashing of teeth for September.’

‘No, September, no. The rock allows you to be pregnant, because the rock herself gave birth to a child tree.’

‘I ate of the fruit, this will help. Why didn’t you, Rain, feed your belly?’ There was a long silence. I waited, hidden behind the stone in the shape of a stool.

‘We tried to kill the tree,’ Rain said from the new depth of her sounds, ‘but this child cannot be murdered or taken away on a rope.’

‘And they . . .’ September whispered, ‘did they watch us through their coloured domes?’

I couldn’t catch Rain’s answer because Leeds upset a boulder on his way up, and the noise rolling down the slope increased from echo to echo. Then came the splash of water, and with it ended the conversation of my two wives.

For hours I lingered on in a dazed state between my new respect for Rain and the surprise at my sudden inability to lead the circle out of this rocky islet. Perhaps, I thought, a tiny particle of the fruit had dissolved on my tongue and was now poisoning my blood stream. Leeds had his sluggish moments, too. Having hoisted his self-confidence so high at first, he seemed unable to stay there, above his ordinary moods.

Gone was his superior talk, his boasting, and he would doze off, just like Joker and myself, in the middle of doing something. Once between a nap and a yawn I caught him staring at the edge of the domes which were sometimes visible over the coastline. This reminded me of Rain’s conversation with September.

The next morning, when the domes seemed to be sliding away from the Safety Zone, I went up to Rain, sat next to her in the skimpy shade under the tree, and pondered in silence over my question. Then I said it very quickly:

‘And they, on whose side do you think they are?’

‘They?’ Rain surprised me. I thought she knew whom I meant.

‘They, who else . . .’ I pointed towards the retreating line of colour. Then I blurted out the name: ‘The skymen, Rain, on whose side do you think they are?’

‘Whose side?’ This astonished me even more. Was Rain already losing her awareness and falling into our communal kind of stupor! But as soon as I saw the expression of her eyes, I had no doubt about her new intelligence.

‘You know well what I am asking. Are they on the side of the tree, on your side, Rain, or do you think they’re helping Leeds, Joker and—’ I paused, ‘and September!’

‘In your circle, Dover, you had us on both your sides. Whose side do you think were you on!’

I goggled and picked up a needle from the ground. If there was a fresh twig to be torn off, I would have eaten it then, like Leeds. The dry needle broke between my teeth and I spat it out.

‘Everybody in my circle was on two sides at once.’ The way I said it began to worry me. Then I tried to explain, got myself entangled in geometrical terms because of September whom I mentioned as the one of us who often stood or lay within the circle.

‘Who knows, Dover, we may be inside their circle. And the skymen—’ she pronounced the word with ringing clarity—’are on all our sides all the time.’

‘Which means that they don’t care,’ I said, rather pleased with my summing up.

Rain smiled at me as if I were a very clever or a very silly child. But instead of giving me a kiss, she hugged her tree.

How strange, I thought, watching her precise, unhurried movements, how strange that I should have taught this woman to memorize her own name. Real rain doesn’t stain.

No, she had no stain, not now. And she appeared to possess a different reality, almost tangible, as that tree she was embracing.

Out of rivalry with Leeds, though we both seemed equally sluggish of late, I went to Rain, my first wife, in the middle of the night. This tree islet was clearly meant to begin a new vegetation and a new breed of men. Why shouldn’t I be a begetter! I originated a circle, I brought my circle here across the land and the water.

I bent over Rain, but she was asleep under her tree. My head became heavy, then a brief spell of dizziness followed. I thought I dreamt, leaning against the trunk, but no picture developed when I came to my senses. Carefully I stepped over the rope, rubbed my temples to get rid of a headache; then in the same spirit of rivalry, I went in search of September. Her womb was mine too, I had entered her body before Leeds. No, I didn’t find the mingling of male seeds abhorrent.

I knew the passages between the boulders, I recognized the mossy mounds in the dark. This rock might have been my birthplace, why not? On whose authority did we believe that the place we had come from lay underground?

Half-way down the slope I saw my second wife stretched out on a stone ledge, one of her arms dangling over another ledge a few steps below. Joker was claiming his male right to her body which generous Leeds didn’t mind sharing either with me or with him. I decided there and then that our crossing back shouldn’t be delayed a day longer.

Back in the Safety Zone we were met by a welcoming party. It consisted of several hundred boxes, with hardly any space between them, and each had a door open.

There was a breeze under the natural clouds, and the doors swung out and in, creaking on their hinges.

‘They’re inviting us in,’ Leeds observed brightly. ‘Difficult to choose, isn’t it?

You’ve never seen so many hygiene boxes in one row, have you, Dover?’

I nearly laughed, not at his irritating words, but at his belly. It had grown big since the crossing, and his buttocks too had expanded suddenly to balance the weight in front.

Leeds looked a barrel in the middle, and a turret above, and I wouldn’t have hesitated to point that out to him, had not September shrieked at the top of her voice:

‘I won’t go in! I won’t go in!’

Underground

1

Then there were no lights in the tunnel, neither red changing to green, nor green changing to red. Patrick walked on the ledge towards the beam of his own torch. He had bought it at Woolworth’s in the King’s Road together with two plastic wallets, one for the quids his father always carried in wads and one for the quids he himself was to pull out of those wads. Patrick had three on him now, just in case; he might have some unforeseen and unnecessary expenses, as Dolly-mum would say, during his long walk underground.

Thick cables and other things, crooked and coiled like tree roots in the park, accompanied Patrick on his way. They ran ahead and he marched in their direction, confident that neither the cables nor Boris could really get lost. Perhaps what he saw were the toes of park trees trying to wiggle deep into the earth. Pipes maybe. Dolly-mum often said if only you could see my boy how much dirt flows under these lovely streets, all those sewers and pipes, every time you pull a plug, swish, down it goes, lower and lower, until the whole nasty stink disappears, I honestly can’t think where.

And now Patrick knew where, or at least he could tell his second mummy which way the pipes went. Not that he wanted to upset her about staying in the Underground after the last train and long past his bedtime. But he thought he was being brave, and the torch made the dark not quite so dark. Funny to be meeting Boris like this. Should they say ‘how do you do’, or ‘hello chum’, or grimace, grin, pull each other’s tie, whistle maybe? If Boris was a joker, Patrick of course wouldn’t speak like a puky no-father; if not, Patrick would talk ever so politely. He knew Boris didn’t mean Boris, they both played a game, Boris waiting in the tunnel, Patrick coming to meet him; all in good fun, just like that fuzzy-mop next door pretending there was another poodle on his tail.

The ledge ended. Patrick had to step down and follow the track. Suddenly, the rails glistened at the turning, a stronger light fell across the beam of his torch, and something was hitting something very hard in the distance. From now on, Patrick could have been only half-brave and retreated as slowly as half-bravery demanded, but he compromised with his shaking knees and stopped instead of taking to his heels. Then he ventured two small steps, halted and switched off his Woolworth’s torch. From afar, a few shadows answered him at once with a mime. They did this and that, their hands almost beckoning Patrick to approach.

Ho-ho-ho! Patrick resorted to his dad’s hollow laugh to silence the pounding of his heart, but the mimers were in no way appeased. Well, so much for poor Boris, Patrick said to himself, the devils have already got him, and they’re boiling him in a cauldron to put the dirt back into him. And when that’s finished, the dirtiest yes-devil will unbaptize Boris, so that he might again be as Greek and Orthodox as Patrick’s first mummy.

The cauldron did look like a cauldron even when the devils hid their horns from Patrick, and it smelt like hell all the time. The banging, too, was terrible, and it stuck to the roof. How it must have hurt those tree toes up there.

‘Holy smoke!’ one of the devils shouted, ‘there’s a boy walking on the track.’

Two shadows moved away from the cauldron. Patrick held his breath, then one of them showed a face, and the face spoke.

‘You know, young fellow, you could have electrocuted yourself.’

This seemed to be the appointed moment for the scholarly reputation of St.

Patrick’s School, shining even through its inglorious rejects. Electricity, well—Patrick Saint Ginger was bottom of the class, but not Patrick Boris.

‘If that had happened, sir,’ Patrick paused to clear his throat, ‘you and all the other gentlemen would have been electrocuted with me.’ He said it in his most charming voice which Dolly-mum liked and praised so often. On that voice alone you’ll go very far, Patrick; remember to use it whenever you can, she would repeat. The combined effect of learning and charm produced great laughter around, and the devils not only loved Patrick for being Patrick, but obligingly changed into workers with a kettle on the boil and an extra cup ready for a nocturnal visitor.

‘You know a lot, don’t you? Have a cup of cha and rest. Here.’ A folded mackintosh fell on a dirty bag. ‘What’s your name, chum?’

Patrick liked being called chum. Daddy was his chum, Dolly-mum was dad’s favourite lady chum. So he told them his name, Dolly-mum’s address, his father’s telephone number, and explained between sips of tea why daddy didn’t take kindly to calls before half past one. Did he work night shifts, someone asked, and Patrick was at a loss because he only remembered Father Pio being called shifty something. Dolly’s advice came to his rescue. He used his most charming voice and punctuated sentences with sirs.

As the foreman was about to go up the tunnel to fetch a smart police car, so he said, Patrick created quite a stir by casually dropping the name of Boris.

The questions they asked then! And the foreman stepped onto a cup of tea, and someone cursed because his finger got burnt on the edge of the cauldron, and the noise that tool-bag made being tossed about.

‘Which way did you say your little brother was going?’

‘Boris is not little, he’s my age.’

‘Never mind that, Patrick. Where did he say he was going?’

‘He didn’t say anything, sir. You see, yes-sir, I was supposed to meet him down here. We haven’t met for some time, actually.’

Patrick sighed and added ‘yes sir.’

From this moment on, everything was great fun, and Boris must have loved it as much as Patrick, whichever hole he peeped through. Boris Patrick could be a joker, too, if he wanted.

The best part of the adventure came after they had brought a police dog into the tunnel. It didn’t bark, didn’t piss at all, but started on the job at once, sniffing Patrick and going round the tool-bag. Much nicer than the poodle, Patrick thought, and cleverer too, because the big Sergeant Dog refused to look for Boris where Boris couldn’t possibly be found. One of the workers said a rude thing about this, which the policeman didn’t like, and finally they took Patrick and the dog upstairs into the empty Tube station. There everybody kept mum until Dolly arrived. She scolded Patrick a little, but the sight of the police dog infuriated her. Dolly-mum turned against the man who held the leash.

‘Sending an alsatian after a quiet obedient boy like Patrick, that’s not very nice, officer.’ Here Dolly raised her voice, probably to wake herself up; she did look very sleepy, Patrick thought. ‘I am not surprised now that the Press prints all these stories about your men. After this incident, I honestly wouldn’t mind writing a letter myself, to the Sketch.’

‘Madam,’ the police foreman intervened, ‘I know you are upset, but we’ve been doing our best to trace the other boy. He will be found before long, I assure you.’

‘What boy?’ Dolly blinked her eyes and looked at Patrick to make sure. Patrick smiled sweetly: he was the boy, his second mummy’s boy.

‘Boris, Madam,’ the officer was politeness itself, and explained at slow length how it all happened: the pre-arranged meeting, the walk inside the Tube, the workers on the track, the dog-Patrick was duly impressed by his own achievement so far and by the man’s memory, who deserved even higher marks than Father Pio.

Dolly-mum kissed Patrick on the head as if she knew what he was thinking and said:

‘Patrick dear, what’s this all about! I hope you didn’t ask another boy to take so unpleasant a walk in the night!’ ‘Oh, Dolly-mum, it’s all right, you know about Boris, don’t you! I did tell you about him, surely I did.’

Dolly tried hard to remember through the tiredness on her face and all that powder on top of it. Patrick couldn’t bear seeing his second mummy like that, so he used the charming voice she loved to hear.

‘Well, Dolly-mum, Boris is really with me, right here, you see. He’s a bit of a joker, Boris Patrick is. And now I’d rather like to go to bed, if you and these gentlemen don’t mind.’

A smart police car waited outside, just as the man had said down there in the Underground.

Nothing much was done to Patrick, with Patrick, and about Boris Patrick after the first tunnel escapade. Dolly-mum talked to his father on the telephone, she talked twice, later they had dinner together in Chelsea, Patrick was promised a holiday in Cornwall, but when, they wouldn’t say. Somehow the son chum didn’t feel like pressing the father chum: that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen between real chums. Once, for a longish moment, he thought about that door to his dad’s bedsitter. A few lines in chalk might shake up the demons of foul sublimation, but either Patrick had no chalk at home or didn’t want to change a whole quid for two miserable bus fares, so the scheme was quickly abandoned.

Patrick’s second escapade ended in complete failure, although he had prepared it with two maps of the Underground, thought out a few cunning decoys, and kept everything secret from Boris. It was to be, in fact, an independent expedition without any pre-arranged meeting between brothers, mothers or fathers for that matter. He made one fatal exception. The police dog gave him the idea of taking the poodle to outsniff any possible intruder on four legs. The poodle was groomed for the part in rain, drizzle and at dusk, whenever the lady next door couldn’t go out for her walks because of rheumatism.

She told Dolly-mum on each occasion what a nice and thoughtful boy she was bringing up.

The poodle, Nicky, could travel on any London transport, so well behaved and quiet he was. Nicky only barked at home to cheer up the rheumatic lady. Patrick had high hopes of him, but the fuzzy mop wouldn’t co-operate when the time came. He had to do his business at every single lamppost, and there were fifteen of them on the way to the Tube station. In the lift, too, he drew attention to himself by licking people’s hands and umbrellas. Finally, instead of entering the tunnel with his sniffer forward, the stupid mop smelt some wet spot on the platform and ran off, yelping.

Then he yelped and yelped at the closed grating inside the station and in no time people gathered, those especially who took their dogs for a late pee walk. And a policeman happened to be on his beat near by. Augustus the father arrived in person, and Patrick returned to Dolly-mum’s doll house in a taxi. Silence was observed on the way by both sides. Chums had their code and stuck to it, particularly when a chum could also snooze at will.

Augustus consulted his panel doctor, met Dolly-mum twice, gave the doctor a tinkle, and off they went, Dolly and Patrick to a big hospital. In the waiting-room Patrick saw a boy, older than himself, who was trying to push his whole hand deep into his mouth, the saliva dribbling down his spotty chin. He didn’t like the sight and told Dolly-mum about it, and she was nice, as always, giving him toffees to suck.

‘It’s a good place this. Famous in London and in the world too, I suppose, London being such a big and important town. And you know what, Patrick, your first mum was here when she delivered you. In a private room, of course. They told you at your school about babies and bees, didn’t they!’ Patrick nodded solemnly. ‘Well, they always rush these things nowadays.’

The boy opposite Patrick still couldn’t swallow his right hand.

Now he was considering his left for size. Patrick felt sick and thought of himself as a baby in a private hospital cot. Then Dolly-mum said something about the maternity ward and he asked where the loo was. On leaving the lavatory, Patrick followed the signs up the stairs, down the stairs, left, right, straight, until he found himself in a large waiting room full of big-bellied ladies who were sitting with their legs apart, too heavy to get up in a hurry. So he gave them all a friendly smile, took a blue chalk out of his pocket and started from the right corner where the wall looked very white.

‘Ffuk Venezia,’ he wrote in large letters, then his spelling went wild, and two nurses had to hold his hand to get the chalk out.

2

‘And how is your Mrs. patho?’

‘She’s a Miss, father, and she still likes listening to rude words.’

‘Ah! Why hasn’t she got a husband?’

‘I’ll ask her. She comes from South Africa and is very Indian. Beautiful.’

‘Are you sure, my boy, you’ve got it right?’

‘Positive, yes, father.’ And Patrick laughed. He could just imagine his daddy in a white robe, his head even balder at the top, and a wad of banknotes dangling from a cord instead of beads.

‘Ho-ho-ho.’ Like Boris, Patrick’s father was always ready to share a joke, whether he understood it or not. This time, however, he bulged his watery eyes and asked: ‘What’s so funny? Am I kicking the wrong ball, or something?’

Patrick saw two balls at once, and remembered what the patho Miss said. No, he wouldn’t snort or titter. Balls, so what?

It was strange to watch his father in an armchair. He didn’t quite seem his usual recumbent self, though he had a cushion under his head and kept closing his eyes.

Augustus puffed at a cigar, and this alone made him distant, playing a hide-and-seek game in the midst of all that cloudy smell.

‘Oh, nothing, dad. How is your wallet keeping?’

‘Ah! the wallet. Fine, fine. Use it for fivers. Good present.’

‘How many cigars do you smoke in a day?’ This sounded chummy and grown-up.

‘Cigars? Never touch them, my boy, unless they’re given away.’

‘Who gave these away?’

‘A lady-friend, Patrick. She got the date of my birthday wrong, poor dear. Never refuse presents, I always say. Would you like a couple of quid?’

‘My birthday is in September, don’t you remember, dad?’ Patrick smiled at what he’d just said. Remember September, that’s funny.

‘Ho-ho,’ Augustus came loud and clear on a smoke wave. ‘You might need a pound to give your lady patho if she gets a bit impossible. You know women. . . .’

‘I know.’

‘Always follow Augustus’s quid principle, my boy. Ah—’ a smoke pause, ‘have I ever told you, Patrick, about my rifle when I was in the army?’

‘Did you shoot lots of people?’

‘No. You haven’t heard about the rifle, then. Ho-ho-ho! my dear boy, you must be the last man in London who hasn’t heard that story. I’d better light another present and stretch my weary legs.’ Augustus did both, asked Patrick to move nearer to the armchair, and with a splendid reclining gesture, began his tale from the depth of the cushion:

‘When those fools couldn’t do without me, they called me up. Ah! you know what that is, Patrick. Joining the army. Barracks, uniforms, sergeants, things like that. And rifles too, of course, ho-ho-ho! I nearly forgot the horrid beast. Well, there I was snoring away on my army bed, when the sergeant came in and said “Private Flaherty so-and-so, you haven’t cleaned your so-and-so rifle?” I turned my back to the sergeant and told him to go to hell. He didn’t, Patrick my boy, he was exceedingly rude to your dad. And the other so-and-so chaps jumped off their beds and started polishing their so-and-so rifles, just to show how they cared about them. I pulled a quid out of my pocket, put it on the bed by my side and said straight into the brute’s so-and-so moustache: “My good man, would you do me a favour, and clean my rifle for a quid—” The sergeant’s moustache nearly fell off from surprise. But he took the money all right, polished the old rifle like a brass kettle, and two days later your dad was singled out on a parade for his devotion to duty. Do you know, my boy, I never cleaned that so-and-so thing until the end of the war.

Sergeants changed, the fronts changed, but my quid principle remained the same. Come to think of it, I could have bought ten new rifles with all that money I spent on keeping one free of rust.’

‘Have you still got it with you, father?’

‘Good heavens, what a thought! No, Patrick, the army doesn’t get rid of rifles that way. The government sells them for scrap.’

‘Do you want me to buy a rifle as a present for Miss patho?’

‘Patrick, you didn’t get the point of my story.’

‘Didn’t I?’

‘No. Whenever people start being a nuisance, try to charm them with a quid. Just put it down and see what happens. It never fails, the Augustan law.’

‘Well then, I’ll give my lady doctor a pound and ask her why she hasn’t got a husband.’

‘Yes, my son . . .’ Patrick’s father stretched his mouth in a wide yawn. ‘Yes, you do that, and she’s sure to say plenty. Now run to Dolly-mum like a good girl. I’m dead tired. I’ve never been so tired since my army days.’

Patrick didn’t hurry with the quid. Miss patho, Sindra by name, which was like Sandra, only Indian, and Patrick couldn’t help getting it wrong, the beautiful lady doctor behaved well, even though she liked hearing dirty words. Patrick concentrated on the kissable line of down just above her dark red lips, it made the mouth look larger, especially when she was listening and scribbling on her pad. Some hours were less kissable than others because Patrick had to watch his own pad, and draw, draw, draw, whatever came to his head. Apparently things jumped into his head, without waiting long outside; just like cats, Sindra said, leaping up all of a sudden.

Patrick wanted to please his beautiful lady doctor. She seemed to like the way he always started each drawing with a pair of ears. So he made them bigger and bigger, and after ten sessions or so he drew nothing but big grumpy asses, with ears like leaves growing upwards, sideways and into one another. Sindra frowned at the progress of monstrous asses, not that she disapproved of them, she disapproved of nothing; but Patrick knew that frown as well as the kissable shadow over the upper lip. Sandra the Sindra expected another leap from those things outside his head.

Finally, Patrick guessed what she wanted. With a splendid swoop of his pencil he outlined a gigantic penis under the donkey’s tummy. The pencil went a bit too far, so that the thing began to trail on the ground which Patrick had indicated with a thick, wavy line.

He stopped and licked his pencil, then his upper lip.

‘Are you sure it is finished, Patrickr Sindra said in her dark Indian voice, almost as cuddly as that of Dolly-mum. What more did she want? Patrick gave her a sheepish look.

‘What is that thing down below, tell me, please?’ Yes, he would please her in a minute or two, but what she really liked first was a bit of teasing.

‘A rifle, Sandra. When they call you up, you know. . . .’

‘A rifle?’ Oh, how beautifully astonished she could appear, if she was in the mood to play with him. Her black eyes were better than those leaping cats she spoke of: they leapt through the eyelashes without even brushing their ends.

‘Yes, it’s all there, in the picture.’

‘I can see it is, Patrick. But why should your donkey carry a rifle?’

‘Well, it needs cleaning, the rifle I mean—and eh . . . eh . . . I know! the sergeant ass does the cleaning ever so often.’

‘Very good, Patrick, very interesting.’ Sindra’s eyes were no longer suspended in a continuous leap; they followed her hand on the pad. Patrick was sometimes angry with her for writing so fast but not now. The teasing had to last a minute more.

‘The rifle gets terribly rusty inside, because they pee through the muzzle.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Oh, people, soldiers, and those men with big hats who ride on top of donkeys.’

‘And the donkey, Patrick, doesn’t he want to pee? Or do something else with his big-big rifle?’

Patrick had his charming smile ready for this moment in their drawing game.

After the smile he threw at her the whole vocabulary of filth that he had been storing up for her dainty ears. He was now a dirty ass, trailing his thing in the mud and kicking right and left. Oh, how beautifully pleased she looked, the shadow over the lip darker for her attentive silence.

‘Was it again Patrick Saint Ginger?’ The lady doctor meant the whispering voice which was passing the words to Patrick.

‘Not really, Doctor.’ When questions went over the same old ground, he showed his boredom by calling her doctor. And he knew well that it upset Sindra. ‘You may remember, Doctor, that ginger Patrick is the one who leads Boris astray.’

‘Patrick, you needn’t be so formal. And Patrick the Ginger is, of course, you, as much as Boris.’

Patrick nodded and waited for the pen to tick something off on the paper. He would let Miss patho have it her own way. Besides, why should he care about the spotty Ginger whether real or imaginary. Why should he care about anything. He heard from behind the desk:

‘Your second mummy and your father—’ Sindra could sound like some puky miss from a nursery school. So he did manage to put her out-’they both will take you to the Zoo. Next Saturday, I think.’

‘Why?’

‘You love animals, don’t you?’

‘Ah !—that.’ Patrick imitated his father.

‘And you should have more walks in the park.’

‘To see the trees, Doctor.’

‘And why not? You said you were interested in trees.’

‘Ah—’ Patrick began to twirl a nylon string in his watchstrap.

‘Do you want to go home now?’

‘I might as well.’ Slowly he took a pound out of his plastic wallet and placed it in front of Sindra. ‘Have a quid like a good girl.’

3

Patrick was suffering from a spell of good memory. He remembered everything he said to Sindra, his own lady doctor, and what Sindra the beautiful told him in her dark Indian voice. Instead of jumping into his head, and then down onto his pencil, things stayed inside and shouted their silly names. Rifle, rifle, rifle, cock, cock, cock, bus, bus, thirty-one, thirty-one, ass, fart, fart ass-hundreds of them, reminding Patrick who they were, what they were, why they did what they said they did; why who what, what who why. Patrick couldn’t sleep because they crawled all over his pillow and under the pillow, horrid, itchy whywhats, hooting little whywhoos.

On his way to Sindra’s cuddly voice, Patrick tried his best not to hear and remember what people said passing him by. Even fat women with prams overtook him.

He became a slow walker, a real slowcoach with a paunch, as Dolly-mum called him twice in the park; but she didn’t guess that it was because of his ears. They weighed such a lot, whatting and whoing, each one heavier than all those donkey flappers he had been drawing for Sandra the Sindra. She wanted him to rest on arrival, and to please her he would lie on a sofa near the window, under a velvet curtain which was sometimes hemmed with fraying light.

One morning after a long chat about Dolly-mum he fell asleep, and then felt a kiss on his forehead. He didn’t open his eyes, expecting another. Dolly-mum often added a quick smack after her goodnight kiss. No, there was no more to come. Perhaps he only dreamt, or remembered a kiss from some other dream, for things, sudden as cats, jumped in his sleep.

Patrick saw Sindra bending over him, armed with pad and pen, the shadow along her upper lip curved towards him.

‘Had a dream, my child’!’ She called him her child. Why not, hissed a whywhat from a secret crack in the sofa. She could be your third mummy, couldn’t she! Or a second, as it is now, provided you got rid of one of the others. Which one, think, said the same wriggling whywhat.

‘No, Sindra, I think I just thought.’

‘What did you think, darling?’ Did she say darling? No, he was still dreaming.

Oh, no he wasn’t.

‘I thought of you, darling,’ Patrick whispered.

‘Very good, Patrick, very interesting.’ But she didn’t want to know what he thought, she didn’t ask any whywhat to crawl out. And no darling dropped from the kissable down over her mouth.

‘Why haven’t you got yourself a husband’!’ Patrick said from the sofa.

‘Would you like me to have a husband?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why not really, Patrick?’

‘Because you are nice. Too nice and much too beautiful for any donkey rifle.’

‘I am happy that you think so. As it is, I don’t wish to marry yet. Do you understand this, Patrick! I don’t wish to have a husband lying in my bed.’

‘They pee an awful lot, don’t they, the husbands?’

He heard vague noises in the long oval tunnel of his memory: a chamber-pot, chipped off at one side, being filled under a yawning shadow; and a slick zip opening over a wet bowl, that thing dangling, a spray, a slick glide upwards; more noises, more shadows; who were they—fathers! husbands!—all in that tunnel!

‘May I go home now?’

‘Yes, you may. Want to spend a penny first! It’s in the corridor, on the right, Patrick.’

‘I know. And I don’t want to. I spent a quid, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you gave me a quid. It was sweet of you. I’ll never give it to anyone else.’

Patrick got up, his knees feeling bruised and swollen around the bone. He rubbed them until they looked very red. Then he flashed one of his charming smiles.

‘Do they hurt you, Patrick?’

‘What, the knees! Not at all.’

‘Now, run along, and be careful when crossing streets. Promise me, darling!’

‘Oh, yes!’

Patrick climbed over the wall between Dolly-mum’s back garden and that other big, posh garden. He was neither on speaking nor on barking terms with the poodle Nicky. A shorn mop of a coward, nothing more. The rheumatic lady hadn’t been on cooing terms with Patrick since that scene inside the closed Underground station. He was never asked to take Nicky for a walk. Just as well. Now no barking was expected from the other garden and no barking came.

Patrick slid down and sat on a kitchen stool which Dolly-mum kept outside in case the sun was warm enough for peeling potatoes in the back garden. The glass door had ugly pockmarks after a spluttering rain the previous night, Patrick’s ears were getting warm, then hot along the edges: nipped by words, cold, icy words, which the human draught had blown from inside the house.

‘I don’t see why a backward child should be treated like an adult. Psychiatry! it’s ridiculous to psycho-analyse children.’

The voice was high-pitched, foreign, but never groping for words. It had so many of them already, chilled inside the mouth, that they came out like ice-cubes on a tray.

Patrick could have repeated them all exactly as they reached him: each meaning defrosted his memory. He was afraid to peer in.

Then another foreign voice took over. It sounded thicker and chewed the sentences before bubbling them out:

‘I am afraid I don’t agree with you, Vera. Modern treatment can do wonders. In the States, for instance, retarded young people with I.Q.s below fifty can be trained to do a job useful to society. In my hospital, and it wasn’t the best I assure you, a little mongoloid made extraordinary progress after only three years of hospitalization.’

‘What is a mongoloid, Doctor Whitestones?’ Dolly-mum asked. But she was not allowed to hear an explanation. The first foreign voice, the one which had a quick supply of ice-cubes in the mouth, rushed in at once:

‘He’s nothing of the sort! My child a mongoloid? Impossible. It’s entirely your fault, Augustus, for giving him such an appalling education. Why didn’t you send Patrick to the Lycée Français as I advised and implored you to do? It was the only school possible for a boy of his cosmopolitan background.’

‘Cosmo-what?’ Patrick’s father bellowed from somewhere far in the house. ‘I didn’t want him to be brought up as a Bulgar. He was born an Englishman. In England, not in Macedonia. So there. I won’t say a word more.’

‘You will, when I take you to your English court,’ the foreign woman replied.

Patrick knew it was his mother, but Boris under his skin itched with jealousy, so he preferred to play it safe. It was perhaps more polite to call her a foreign lady than a woman. His father did that, when he decided to say one word, then ten, then twenty.

Patrick counted them on a silent adding machine inside his spellbound memory.

‘Shut up, woman! If there is any justice left in this country, they’ll deport you to Bulgaria. And your Bulgars will lock you up as a female phantom of the Opera.’

After Augustus the father had spoken, words came in piles on top of one another.

Both mummies were now talking; the first, however, had the last word. To which the doctor replied:

‘Vera, it couldn’t possibly have been P.K.U. Okay, I’ll spell out phenylketonuria, if you wish, but tell me why are you so aggressive about German measles? In the first months of pregnancy they could, I repeat they could, cause mental retardation. Vera, you mustn’t deny the validity of a medical term just because it has the word German in it.

What, Vera? Do I love them? You’re being aggressive again.’

A man with thick glasses loomed against the glass door. His eyes bulged out, his short grey hair stood up. This was beyond any doubt Doctor Patho himself. Patrick crouched behind the kitchen stool, though it was utterly useless. How could anyone hide from glasses like these?

Patrick trembled for Sindra. Doctor Patho was going to marry her. He had come all the way from America to lie in her bed under his powerful black-rimmed spectacles.

By day he would be occupying the sofa, a lavatory chain attached to his right leg. No room for Patrick, no room for anybody. Even Sandra, the beautiful Indian Sindra, would be squashed against the wall when behind her desk, and against the wall when in bed.

Suddenly, Dolly-mum trotted into the garden and cried out at the sight of Patrick:

‘Oh, it’s you! Blow your nose, dear, and come in to say hello to your mum. What a surprise, isn’t it!’ She herself looked sick with surprise.

Through the open door Patrick saw a slim, well-dressed lady who had blue hair and a cat with blue eyes, perched like a parrot on her shoulder. A thin leash hung from the cat’s collar, as far as his mother’s ankle. For a moment which seemed to last very long, Patrick completely forgot about Doctor Patho.

Two days later was Saturday, sunny for autumn and almost warm, the right time to go to the Zoo, especially as it happened to be a sort of delayed birthday for Patrick, who was born on the thirtieth of September. Seven hours more and it would have been October, just think of that. And now it was October, simply because his first mummy couldn’t make the thirtieth. She had to sing in Toronto on the twenty-fifth, in Detroit my dear on the twenty-eighth, then Doctor Whitestones kindly arranged a visit to a world-famous oculist in Chicago at three-thirty on the twenty-ninth, and of course, my dear, the flight was postponed, I spent the night at New York Airport. Jets have become so unreliable recently. No, I really couldn’t get here in time for his birthday. Such a sweet darling.

Talking to Dolly-mum, she called him Patrick. As soon as she turned to him, Patrick became Boris, and Vera played with his name adding bits to it, which sounded funny. She had also a funny way of talking to Prince, the Siamese cat, but she wouldn’t take him to the Zoo. Prince was allergic to parrots, she said, and wherever you went to the Zoo, to any zoological garden, Vera pronounced it jarden, you always saw or heard parrots, and one was enough to make Prince sick. Maybe parrots, too, made Patrick’s father ill, because he said he couldn’t possibly face the Zoo. But he had given Dolly the money for a taxi one way, for the tickets and the seventy-four bus to come back. It was, in fact, a present from his dad; the second mummy provided tea in her blue pot on return.

Walking between his two mums from cage to cage, from the bears on the rocks to the crocodiles behind the glass, Patrick Boris felt that the tiring spell of good memory wouldn’t bind him for much longer. Moreover, he wasn’t in the least allergic to parrots, whether violet and yellow, or yellow and blue, which was very interesting, and he longed to hear that ‘very interesting’ straight from the upper lip of Sindra. He didn’t mind that she believed he was Patrick the spotty Ginger as well; it would be even more fun to have Sindra next to Vera or Dolly-mum, trotting with her crocodile bag just to say hello to a live crocodile.

The croc had his eyelids lowered and looked around without looking. Sly and sleepy, pretending he didn’t really care about those handbags.

‘The croc snoozes away, just like daddy,’ said Patrick, very pleased with his sudden observation.

‘Boris, caro mio! Che intelligente ragazzo!’ Vera covered his newly washed hair with violent kisses and said he smelt nice, which made him enormously proud of himself, of his first mum, of his private lady doctor and of the croc who had dad’s eyelids.

‘I like when you speak Bulgarian, mummy,’ he complimented her, brushing his hair back into position.

‘Call it Dalmatian, and we both will be happy,’ Vera laughed. She enjoyed herself and said so repeatedly to Dolly-mum, who said very little in return. She only squeezed Patrick’s hand from time to time, and he thought it was because of the big apes. They frightened Dolly, the orang-outang most of all: he had no cage manners and kept showing his armpits and his rude scarlet arse to the ladies outside.

‘He should hide himself in the trees,’ said Patrick and squeezed Dolly-mum’s hand, to which she replied with a scarlet blush. ‘Vera-mum,’ he turned on his heel smartly, ‘tell me which of these men in the crowd are descended from the apes?’ His good memory hadn’t as yet left him: he could almost risk spelling ‘descended’, if Vera the Bulgarian wanted to know. She knew only one man descended from a monkey, she said, and winked at Dolly. This time Patrick guessed the intended meaning at once.

‘Well, in this case I must be the son of a monkey too.’

Vera’s nose became narrow with surprise. ‘Retarded!’ she cried to Dolly. ‘What nonsense.’

The conversation over tea at Dolly-mum’s house didn’t go at all well. Both ladies seemed nervous and powdered their faces over cups of tea. Vera unpacked her American birthday present for Patrick which she had forgotten to bring in the morning. It was a space-gun, the latest model, emitting a dustless spray of atomic dust. Patrick adored the changing lights at either end, green to red, red to green, and violet at zero point for instantaneous death. While kisses of life were being exchanged over the weapon, Patrick managed to gasp out one question:

‘. . . would kill well!’

‘Ten times over, Boris. It’s the overkill type, you see.’

‘Do the Bulgars have such weapons, mummy!’

‘I hope not. But a true Bulgarian gentleman, Boris, carries arms to defend his lady’s honour.’

After this and another returnable kiss, Patrick played with the space-gun in the back garden. He wanted to spray Nicky to see what would happen to his crinkles and the mop, but the poodle was probably on his last walk before the Overkill. Then he heard loud voices coming through the glass door. How peculiar, he thought, that his first mum should sound through the glass so very foreign and full of ice-cubes in the mouth.

Perhaps Doctor Patho was back in the house, raping them both, with a cup of tea in his wicked hand.

He felt brave when he pushed the door in. A sly, croc-like, sideways glance. No Patho. The blue tea-pot stood undisturbed on the table. Only Vera looked different. Her slender nose was red, her blue hair bluer. She was holding a handkerchief under her left eye. As for the second mummy, she burnt with terrible colours on top and under her powder. And how she screamed: Patrick never imagined Dolly-mum had that much noise inside her.

He went to bed late and couldn’t sleep. Crying was no use. Besides, he wanted to hold the tears in. Just like not going to the loo when one ought to.

His wrist-watch showed three. He went to Dolly’s bedroom, made sure that she was asleep, and then, very quickly, sprayed her with the dustless death-dust. Dolly-mum jumped up and sneezed. It sounded at first like an overkill sneeze, atomic and final. After that, however, she spoke:

‘Patrick, really! This isn’t funny in the least!’

Patrick didn’t apologize, but sneaked out to look for the potato knife.

Sky

1

I was hanging from a tree, and below, at either side, two men stood: my seventh son and my husband. Amo had strapped me with binds of twisted hair to the bough of an oak-tree, and dug out, according to my wish, a hollow under the tree. And the hollow he had softened with green and yellow moss, so that the fall would be soft, from my womb into the soil.

‘Curse me, husband! Why are you afraid to curse me?’ I cried from above, while the muscles of my arms laboured with the muscles of my suspended belly. ‘I am giving birth to his child, not yours. Why are you here, Adam?’ I weighed two lives, and the earth under the oak was opened to receive one of them: this readiness meant more to me than his presence and his law in the likeness of the law.

‘Eve, Eve, don’t speak. It swells your pain.’ Only this voice had fingers that could touch, and cool the skin, and wipe off the oozing of shame. My second husband, my seventh son, born ten children ago, he now stood waiting for this birth, the first of a new breed.

‘Why are you frightened to curse Amo?’ But Adam kept silent. My first husband guarded his strength with silences.

He had arrived in the night, unannounced by animals, and before the treeman’s parrot had come with a message and a warning.

What could any of them do to me? What could the sky do, when the earth was prepared and my arms were tied to the arm of a strong tree? After this birth we should be in another beginning, free at last from the weakness of our original innocence. Surely the skies between them had no greater strength than the double bond between mother and son?

‘Our father who are in the sky . . . Our father in. . . .’ My first husband was mumbling under the oak-tree, his hands clasped, his knees ready to pull his body down into the dust. Didn’t he know that the law obeyed its own law, that the womb closed in conception had to open in birth? didn’t he know that sons could become fathers, that the mother of the first generation could be the mother of the second?

Suddenly, the pain inside me unlocked a deeper pain which wasn’t mine, but the child’s, crying out its own dread of the beginning. The whole weight of my body was cut in two, the suspended fruit detached itself from the stalk and dropped into the soil. The moss, the green and yellow moss, must have welcomed Eve’s fruit with the softness of a womb, for there was no echo thudding in the hollow, and then the crying stopped, as if swaddled by the hands of the earth.

Both Adam and Amo bent over the hollow. I waited, each muscle along my arms tightening again on a suspended expectation. No, it couldn’t be. I had never given birth to a dead life. Death was only to visit me once. This the law had been made into a law, and the laws obeyed themselves always.

‘It’s not a son, Eve,’ my first husband said.

‘Is the girl breathing? I can’t hear any crying.’

‘She’s speaking with eyes, Eve. They will grow as big as your eyes.’ This was Amo’s voice, happy and sad in turn, the voice of a son in the likeness of the father.

‘Unbind me from the tree, Amo. I am light. I have shed the weight of pain.’ He climbed up the oak-trunk, grasped the bough and in a moment hung next to me. Below, Adam was waiting with his hands outstretched to help me down. Together they carried me into the house, put me on the bed, and then brought the child. When I woke up after a brief sleep, they stood at either side again, both silent. It was for me to speak, and I told Adam.

‘Give her a name.’ He turned his eyes aside. ‘I only had a name ready for a boy.

Yes, you give her one of your names.’ Adam looked at the sleeping child, but didn’t answer me. Then he looked at Amo, and Amo stepped back. Another glance and another step, then another, and he was leaning against the double circle on the wall. There he found courage to open his mouth:

‘I have thought and I have a name for her.’ He was waiting for a sign from Adam, but received neither permission nor a forbidding word. I didn’t want him to lose the strength he felt throbbing on his back, the strength from the circles.

‘Tell me the name you have made, Amo,’ I said.

‘I call her Irda.’

‘It has a happy bird sound, Amo. She is Irda.’ I touched the girl’s forehead and suddenly remembered the tree man’s message.

‘Has the listening bird been here since. . . .’ I couldn’t say more because inside a thought I saw myself hanging from the tree and the pain hung with me, its shadow at either side of the oak, divided. This time Adam answered.

‘We haven’t seen the parrot.’

‘No, we haven’t seen your bird,’ Amo echoed.

‘I must feed Irda,’ I said. ‘Then I shall sleep long. And after my long sleep I shall know what to say to the bird.’

I had no dreams. Perhaps Amo’s child dreamt them for us three in her new-born sleep, still lying between the skies. Rested, without pain, I could move about and do my daily work. Adam was gone. Not far, said Amo, not very far. Only to meet the Sky Man’s voice. One had to walk to that voice as to a place, Amo explained, thinking I didn’t know, and with a child’s insistence mentioned a rock, a lake, a clearing in the forest, an eagle’s nest. These were places one could walk to for a purpose. I didn’t tell him that the voice was a place between the skies, a circle turning upwards which drew the body in and kept it there engirdled by sound and light. No, my son, my husband, wouldn’t understand an explanation like this.

Amo seemed to me more like a child since Irda’s birth. Perhaps it was only my womb feeling their inner similarity. In the presence of Adam, however, he looked different, older almost than his age, as if putting on his face the wrinkled reflection of the begetter. It was a serious but excited boy who was now announcing the visitor I had twice asked about.

‘Eve, your bird is here! The listening parrot, Eve! Violet and yellow, with a red beak. Sitting on the stone.’

‘I know what he looks like, Amo. Let the bird wait. Come to me, Amo, kiss your Eve. You haven’t touched me since you untied my arms from the oak bough.’

‘It was a long sight of pain,’ he said quietly and lowered his head to kiss both my hands. His lips trembled on my skin, and they didn’t move nearer to meet my mouth.

I received the ape’s messenger in the doorway, alone. I sat on the stool stone and the bird hopped about the other stone with which we blocked the entrance against the rain and the hissing cats.

‘Parrot, I have my answer for your master.’

‘Call me Eeve birrd, call me treeman birrd. I carry your ssounds, I carry hiss ssilent sspeech.’

‘You speak better, listening bird, but you still hiss like the prowling cat.’

‘I birrd hate cats. My master kills tree cats for me. Treeman is strong, he wants Eeve strength, because treeman is stronger than all Adam men.’

‘Before your ape master talks peace with me, he must send back my daughters.’

‘Eeve, Eeve,’ the parrot jumped onto my knee, screeched angrily without making any words, then flapped his yellow feathers in front of my face. I tried to catch one of his eyes with a sideways glance to punish him for this impudence, but somehow he managed to hide them by unfolding a rim of violet. When he returned to the entrance stone his speech returned to his beak. ‘Eeve daughters are treewomen now and bear children better than Eeve.’

‘Did you watch?’ I was curious as though it mattered to have had witnesses at Irda’s birth among talking parrots and wordless beasts.

‘Watched with my master. Treeman ssaid Eeve cheated.’

‘Cheated, how!’ The bird surprised me.

‘Eeve not give standing birth. She Eeve was on tree.’

‘I always give birth in this way. My first-born dropped from the cedar-tree and you know he has the cedar’s strength.’ The parrot screeched without words, but it sounded like a mocking laughter. Then he spoke very audibly:

‘Sstorm killed Eeve tree. Eeve Cain killed Eeve Abel.’

I couldn’t answer him, and the mocking parrot triumphed with every colour on his outstretched wings. The hooked beak, too, flowed with blood red, victorious in shape and glow.

‘Treeman ssaid Eeve cheated.’ The repetition jarred on the stone itself. The bird spoke from it, louder and clearer. ‘Treeman can walk and stand. Eeve women weak, have children under trees.’ Then that screech of a laugh again.

‘Go to your ape master now, and tell him what Eve said. And say to him, bird, that he watched the birth of Eve’s new generation. My second daughters and sons will punish the treeman’s tribe.’

‘Amo daughters—Amo curse; Amo sons—Amo death.’

‘Go away, stupid bird!’

‘Bird mother never couples with bird son to make birth.’ And he flew away into sunset, piercing a cloud redder than his beak. Stupid bird, didn’t he see how many birds, both male and female, lived in the sky, and how few we were on the surface?

Soon after sunset, my husband Adam returned, but I wasn’t the first to see him.

Amo must have met him by the ditch and they came together. I found them talking under the oak-tree, very near the moss hollow which was now filled with acorns and covered up with clay. Amo was asking Adam to teach his lips how to move so that animals would understand him. He would scrape off the soft hair on his chin with a sharp flint. No beard for him either if only his father would give him the silent words to trap the beasts more quickly.

By the nightwatch fire in the doorway I heard and observed them. Amo’s black eyes shone next to those blue ones I knew so well, from the times when trees were young and tall with us. Now the sky trees couldn’t stand up to the blows from the sky: they fell, like my cedar, and lay at the watery feet of a storm, humiliated. Some survived, stooping under their own yellow crowns.

Adam’s stoop, his age sinking deeper into the eyes: the blue that was hungry for the sky, real and reflected, the Sky Man’s sky. Oh, how ancient and defeated he looked in the night fire, next to Amo’s eyes which were trying to steal his inner colour. Two fathers underneath the sky. I had to ask Adam about his ‘Our father’, although I half knew the outcome of their meeting.

‘What did he tell you to do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you no orders to punish us? Or is the Sky Man himself going to smite at us?’

‘Our father didn’t speak to me. I heard nothing.’

‘Didn’t you go to meet his voice, Adam?’

‘I did go and I stood alone between the skies. My feet were deep in the clouds.

Then. . . .’ Adam paused, and I was afraid for him, for his eyes and his feet.

‘What did you see then?’

‘Nothing. Both skies emptied themselves. I stood alone in emptiness. And there was that smell in the dark.’ He paused again. ‘The smell of death, Eve.’

2

The next day a message came through the bird from the treeman. I had no choice, the parrot screeched; either I went to live in the treeland, the parrot screeched, or they would take possession of Eve’s country by the big lake and invade my giant trees. Then I would be living in their new treeland, whether I wanted to or not. Theirs was the breed of the second beginning, not mine. I no longer held the queens hip over the earth, for my womb had been polluted by the seed of my son. The screech went on and on, like a pair of Amo’s flints being sharpened against the stone.

I slighted the treeman’s threats by making fun of his messenger. I told Irda that it was a listening bird who amused a tree-ape with human words, just a parrot under all those pretty feathers; and Irda could play with it if she liked. And though my baby daughter didn’t understand any of the words, she waved her hand and tried to catch the parrot’s tail. Angered and offended, the bird flew up, then sat on the edge of the roof, peering down at us. He didn’t feel like talking, but still waited for my reply.

‘Before the winter starts, listening bird, I shall plait a loose basket with a hole for your beak, and it will hang from the ceiling, over Ida’s sleeping basket. You will live up there, eat, listen, talk and lull Irda to sleep with your stories about apes.’

The parrot’s peering eye now had the colour of his beak. I waited for a better moment to confuse his anger. When he spread his wings to keep balance and began trotting along the edge, I suddenly said to him:

‘Look parrot! a word lying on my hair. A jewel word, look!’

The bird looked, his red eye met mine and he lost his balance. He fell to the ground, his tail touching Irda’s leg. She wasn’t frightened, at all, she laughed, and the thin sound stuck in the feathers like the point of an arrow. I wished I had blinded his left eye at least so that the insolent ape man could see the mark of Eve on his servant.

But the eye blinked after a while. The parrot felt the ground with both wings, uncertain how to take off. Then the beak jerked and he left us, slowly rising in the autumn air.

And I persuaded Adam to teach Amo a few silent words from his animal speech, but Amo was a slow learner. He twisted his lips, pushed them up with two fingers, wrinkled his nose to help the fingers, and in the end shaped the bear’s belly-ache sign instead of the monkey’s climbing pout. My first husband tried all over again, then asked Amo to rest his face.

‘Teach Amo tree sounds and bird feather cries. He will be better at them, I know he will.’

‘I have forgotten most of the tree sounds, Eve.’ Something crossed his thought as it was retreating into a grey distance, sadder than the colour of his hair. ‘The trees are beginning to forget some of the sounds, too.’ He turned to our son. ‘Abel, we should leave the animals alone, now that the world is divided. They understand my lips, they listen with their eyes and trust what I tell them, but they never show me their thoughts.’

‘Because they cannot think,’ I said.

‘It would calm the wild beasts to hear Amo rustle like an oak,’ my second husband said.

I saw the first band of apes on my land, when Amo had learnt by heart some oak-tree calls and a juniper whistle, enough to rouse a wave of curious answers from the forest beyond the rain wall. The apes sat quiet on the high boughs, catching the murmurs that passed from tree to tree before they rebounded against the sounds Amo was sending out. I wondered whether the puzzled animals knew what each sound meant, but they certainly seemed disturbed by the noise in the trees.

The night came, and they were still there. Their presence kept me awake. I told Amo to light two low fires by the wall, but not too near the needle bushes. The fire was the sign they all understood. But the full moon made the apes watchful. What more did they expect to see?

I got up, went to the glowing cinders and raked the ashes under them. The fire rose and threw a shadow from my body onto the stone wall. A murmur caught the long feathers of the palm-trees and shook them one by one. But it was the leaping and tail-swinging of monkeys that had caused the murmur. They were hopping about the palms to get a closer look at me. Then came a faint rustle, an echo of many rustles from the woods beyond my forest. The distant oaks were still acknowledging Amo’s call in the likeness of Adam.

For a moment I rejoiced that the new birth had brought them closer to each other: my seventh son had found his right to kingship in Adam, the name-maker and the first begetter. I had therefore done no wrong by receiving Amo’s seed. The treeman, chieftain of the apes, was jealous of him, and envious of Eve’s forethoughts. The evil had been spent long ago through Cain’s hands and loins, and now it was passing to the tree tribes of monkeys through the wombs of my three foolish daughters. That was why the big ape man fancied himself to be equal to real men in sharing a small part of our inherited evil.

‘Go home, apes,’ I cried over the dying fire. ‘You are on the sacred land of Eve.

Adam will punish you!’

A louder and wider murmur started amidst the palm-trees. They are leaving, I thought, they have recognized my voice. But as I stood in the doorway looking up through the shimmer around the moon, I saw long swaying shadows, like weeds that creep along the branches only to slip off at their end. Not weeds, no, these were their ugly tails; still wagging their insolence at me from their safe hiding places.

I put my hands at either side of my mouth, so that my voice would carry and reach them even on the topmost boughs.

‘I have warned you, stupid beasts!’

Then I woke up Adam who was sleeping on a thick moss bedding next to Amo under his beaver skins.

‘Rise, you have a duty. The apes are desecrating my trees.’

Adam got up at once. He never muttered in his sleep nor yawned on waking. He had mastered the habits of his days and his nights.

‘It’s not for me to threaten them, Eve. But I will ask them to go.’

When he appeared by the tall entrance stone, himself twice its height, the tails hung down rigid against the sky, more like dead eels smoked over the kitchen fire than dead creeping weeds. Then I heard his laugh. It wasn’t often heard, not since he began visiting us at my house by this lake.

‘They are so cunning, the apes. Like children, Eve, before some small mischief.

Look at them, pretending they don’t know that I am here. Silly children, they’ve turned their heads away.’

‘Because they’re afraid of your eyes.’

‘I don’t want any creature to be afraid of my eyes.’

‘Use your voice, then. Just give the impudent beasts one loud shout, and they will scurry away with tails in their teeth. Do it now.’

‘They’re probably tired after jumping and squeaking late into the night. Let them sleep till dawn. It’s not long to sunrise.’

His arm round my shoulders had a tender touch. I obeyed my first husband, and we went inside.

He came to lie in Eve’s bed. His hands, his lips, his legs, his beardless face, all his body was love. I breathed him as if the air of my lake had lost its sedge-scented strength.

And I didn’t think of Amo and his desire for me. For I had no thoughts in this reunion, I only knew, as Adam always knew, and the knowing was a body inside a body, a feeling inside the thing felt, an understanding inside the thing understood, never a transit from a point to a point, a picture passing in the likeness of a shadow. I knew then I loved him.

But I still wanted Adam to think love, just to hear his thought in a word.

‘Did the Sky Man tell you to sleep with me once more! To make me regret the seed of Amo, and in regretting forget!’

‘No, Eve. You know well that our father’s voice didn’t meet me last time. I stood alone in emptiness. It is because of that emptiness that I am in you now.’

‘Do you love me, Adam?’

‘That’s beyond an answer, and you wish to hear a mere answer, as easy to reach as your ear.’

‘Yes, I want you to name me in both of us. What are we to each other? Now, Adam, what are we now?’

‘I am your inner circle, and you are mine. Now as much as in our beginning. And he taught me how to draw us both on the clay of this wall when the clay was soft, so that we wouldn’t forget.’

I knew that Adam spoke of the Sky Man. And there were the animals outside, sitting in the trees, keeping a night vigil in the trees. The Sky Man had allowed the man-mocking apes to enter my circle of land, as he had earlier put his beasts between me and my husband.

At dawn, without making much noise, the monkeys slid down the tree trunks and touched the ground which was Eve’s, for Eve and her children to walk on.

3

For a long time they stood in rows under my palms, my pines and my oaks, a new live boundary across the lakeland, and neither Amo nor Adam did anything about it. The apes, Adam said, were behaving well so far, they obviously didn’t mean any harm; they were just curious to see what a human family looked like in its own homestead. What else did I expect from a curious crowd of apes? They were not a crowd, I answered, but an orderly army, lined up for a purpose.

Amo thought the purpose was simple: the monkeys wanted a free passage through our trees to visit their kinsmen separated from the main ape woodlands by the northern tip of our lake. And since they respected Eve, they arrived in a large number to ask this favour from her. They didn’t wait for my permission. I told Amo, they invaded the tree tops and were already establishing their pathway over my land.

‘They may be waiting for someone,’ Amo said cheerfully, as if that someone was himself. He nearly waved towards the crouching rows. I noticed his unfinished gesture.

‘Why don’t you go and greet them on my behalf!’

‘I would, Eve, but I think the waiting is over. They’re all looking to the right.’

And they were. I stepped in front of my husbands and saw the treeman approaching on his hind legs, a bright mop of feathers on his head. Out of precaution against the light in the sky and Eve’s gaze, both his eyelids were visibly lowered. But the ape strode well, almost like a man, weak perhaps in the knees after a long journey, and occasionally using a tail instead of a traveller’s staff. From the feathers on his head came the familiar voice:

‘Make way for treeman, for tree-Adam who can stand, walk and talk! I am his voice. Listen to my master’s voice! Make way, make way. . . ’

It was unnecessary to ask for that, since the monkeys had arranged themselves in such neat files. And what I soon witnessed was a vile sacrilege or a mockery. With monkeys one could never be sure. The treeman shuffled his short legs in the passage between two rows and with his paw touched some monkeys on the forehead, between their sly little eyes. They wagged their ugly tails and bowed. Then they scratched their armpits or behinds, out of pleasure maybe, if not in mockery again.

‘The big tree-ape is aping Adam. Why do you stand and do nothing? Adam, you must show your might before this impudent beast, you must use the law given to you by the Sky Man.’

‘And what is my law?’ Adam whispered, not to me but to that inner circle in himself he had spoken about. ‘What right have I got to castigate animals for their knowledge of free will, as small as mine?’

The parrot was screeching something in the monkey language of squeaks. I saw his hooked beak turning to and fro together with the treeman’s neck, and the red on it seemed to shriek at the sun. What was the speech about? What would they do next?

That tail guarding the ape’s balance in the rear: I watched every move of it. If it jerked suddenly, if it swished up, pointing towards us, this would be an order to attack. I only hoped that

Adam would kill them all in one blow of his breath. Oh, how I longed to see thousands of those brown tails and paws beating and scratching the ground in painful dread!

The tail went up, swayed near the bird’s own tail and dropped down soon after.

No ape moved. There was silence. And the silence angered me more than the parrot’s noise. I had waited long enough through their delay tactics.

‘Amo,’ I said, ‘prove to your mother and wife that you are the second Adam.

Teach the beasts to obey your eyes. Go to them and show yourself as you are, the name-maker and the maker of weapons.’

Amo nodded. Then he took my elbow with the gesture I knew so well, the gesture of bending a weapon. I felt his courage suckling mine through the skin. Before they withdrew, his fingers trembled.

‘Eve, I’ll speak to the treeman.’ And he stepped forward.

‘Don’t listen to the listening bird. Punish his master.’

‘I will, Eve.’

I was very proud of his manly walk. His right hand swung forward accustomed to holding a bow or an axe, but now he carried nothing. The parrot shrieked and the treeman turned at once. He, too, stepped forward, but wouldn’t look straight at Amo. I wished Amo had a thin arrow ready on a hair-string to pierce a hole in one of those sly eyelids.

Then the ape-man would have to stare through stinging blood.

The apes stayed in unbroken rows as before, their tails in the grass, some coiled like vipers. Above them the parrot spoke their master’s thoughts.

‘Thiss iss Amo Abel. He iss Eeve sson hussband. Lissten, he knows tree speech, he knowss tree speechch.’

A murmur began in the first file, grew louder in the next, and burst into menacing squeaks. This was the time of decision and risk. Amo stood near the chieftain of the apes, ready to send a double arrow from his black eyes.

‘Only tree-Adam may sspeak tree sspeech. Only . . .’ The parrot stopped because the head under him tilted. It must have been a sign. I saw the bird flap one wing; his claws seemed to be scratching the ape behind the ear. This quickened a few thoughts crawling beneath all that hair.

‘Treeman had drream. Lissten!’ The bird screeched and hissed. ‘The Ssky Man sent dream to treeman to punishsh Amo.’

‘Amo!’ I cried, ‘don’t listen to the bird. Go at the ape’s eyes. Amo, the eyes !’

In answer to me, he stretched his arm out as if to force the other to look with fully opened eyes, but no sooner had he made that gesture than the tails, several of them at once, uncoiled and swung out from the grass.

‘Amo!’ I shrieked and grabbed my own hand.

His neck was encircled by the tails, they jerked, intertwined with one another and pulled, closing the loop. Amo’s head jumped, stayed in the air for a moment, and then the apes loosened their grip. One by one, the tails slackened and dropped. My son’s body was leaning forward. If I could have run then, I would have caught him into my arms, so slow was that fall from death visible to death invisible.

‘They have strangled my son,’ I said to Adam in a very calm voice, and Adam started to walk with his light inaudible steps, each of them pounding inside my heart. The treeman advanced first on his hind legs, then he used one of his arms, and finally walked on all fours until he was but a few steps away from Adam. I expected him to rise and give the others a sign to attack. The ape, however, remained on the ground, his big jaw close to the grass, his tail trailing behind.

Adam didn’t touch the treeman. He didn’t even utter a sound, or perhaps I heard nothing. If he shaped a silent word with his mouth for the beast to see, it wasn’t noticed, because the big ape kept his head down. Adam bent over it, and this was all he did.

The treeman, chieftain of the apes, tumbled to one side, dead. I knew it couldn’t be otherwise. The parrot, too, fell into the grass, but this wasn’t meant to be the end for him. Soon, violet and yellow streaks glistened from the top of a thorny bush, he was cleaning his beak on a twig. And 1 knew in an instant that the listening bird who had learnt speech from me, would never screech out another human word. His service to the ape master was over.

None of the monkeys dared to approach the body of their ruler. They stood in the same orderly files, this time waiting for a command from Adam. They watched his beardless face, thousands of small shifty eyes glaring at his mouth. The lips didn’t move.

Silence hurt them as it hurt me, yet only from this silence could a new event emerge.

Adam bent over the treeman again, and picked him up without effort. He was a big beast, longer and heavier in the stillness of death, and yet my husband carried him like a child who had fainted. Our own son was lying near by, his beautiful face trampled into the earth, smeared with the dung of monkeys, and Adam passed by his body without looking; he walked on, towards me, the ugly tail showing after each step. Adam knew that my legs had no strength to take me to Amo. But why couldn’t he understand that the sight of that carcass would only bring the whole horror back to me?

‘I didn’t throw a curse on him, Eve,’ he said, his arms displaying the dead ape before me. ‘I must have wished his death. I only thought his death, I only. . . .’

‘Adam, Adam. . . .’ I felt angry pain in my eyes and in my throat which had to let the words come out. ‘Give this abominable carcass to the tiger fish in my lake. I don’t want to poison my sight with hate.’

‘But, Eve, look at this misery here, his misery and mine. We both wanted to kill, and now we are both smelling of death. Can’t you feel, Eve, how putrid my thoughts have already become?’

I was staring at the treeman with hateful fascination. There he lay on my husband’s arms, his eyes for once fully opened. There was sadness and old age in those dark small eyes of the ape. I seemed to see some grey hairs over his low forehead, and this greyness of the animal hair made him look almost human. He was born to be the first among his kind, a new beginning to the breed of apes, a beast in the likeness of man, who challenged Adam and fell dead at the feet of Adam.

‘Have pity on our misery, have pity. . . .’ And Adam wept over the body of the treeman.

‘Pity!’ I echoed. And immediately I understood that he wasn’t talking to me, but to his ‘Our father’. The Sky Man, as was his prerogative and recent habit, didn’t answer my husband. And I doubted whether he pitied that miserable animal whom he had set against Eve and her children.

Meek and respectful, the monkey army received a blessing from Adam, and left my homestead, carrying the body of their chieftain back to the land of the trees.

Two days after the burial of Amo, my husband departed to wander, as before, from homestead to homestead, wherever his three generations had settled.

I lived alone with Irda by the big lake. Now I couldn’t count my ages by my new children, for I gave birth no more. The last time Adam lay with me there was no conception. Irda played with plants, stones and sand.

I don’t remember how it happened that small baby apes started coming to us.

They were gay, gentle and playful. At first I resented them, but I saw that Irda looked happier in their company. She grew tall and as beautiful as her father.

Her pets, the monkeys, didn’t grow up with her. They would come to visit her when they were small, then their children came.

The skies opened many times during Irda’s girlhood, and we battled with torrential rain and the suffocating growth of life on the surface. Then a long drought sucked up moisture and covered the surface of Eve’s earth with multitudes of insects.

At the very end of the drought Irda left my home. She went to the treeland of her own free will. To live with the apes.

Book Three

Surface

1

‘I won’t go in!’ September shrieked again, when one of the swaying doors slipped off the hinge and seemed to be falling towards her. But the door wedged itself into the sand and stopped moving. Immediately, Joker said he could see something polished and dark inside the box.

‘That’s hygiene.’ And Leeds obliged us with his jolly chuckle. ‘Peep in, Joker, like a brave lad that you are, but don’t forget to come back.’ Another chuckle. ‘Wit for all occasions, that’s me. And this is some occasion. Dover, my good fellow, lend me your ears and your laughing lips. You put me off my own wit, when you look so grumpy.’

‘Oh, come off it, Leeds. We have to think hard, all of us. We should stay in a firm circle while these things keep gaping at us.’

‘I wish we were on the tree rock,’ September said, trying to hold Rain with both hands.

‘That’s a reasonable wish, you must admit, Dover. After all, we did reach the islet and now we are not on it. Why?’

‘Why, you ask?’ My voice was more an echo of doubt than a retorted query. ‘Did you object when we were crossing back, Leeds?’

‘Me, object! My dear chap, now that I am a married man I am hardly in a position to say no to anything. Besides, you led us splendidly through the waves, just like . . . wait a minute, what was his name?’

‘Moses,’ said Joker who in the past had watched some micro-lessons in history on the mini-screen.

‘Really! I believe you’re right, Joker. So we’ve got a new Moses, how very convenient, historically speaking in the future present.’

I knew what he implied by the future present. Leeds had a fool’s genius for innuendoes. ‘Leeds, Joker! come here,’ I said with as much authority as I could possibly give to my tone. ‘We must stand in a circle.’

‘Too late,’ Leeds answered. ‘Dear cousins, lift up your hearts and your big mouths. The goodies are falling from the sky.’

And they were, in white and pink clouds: the food flakes sent down through the openings in the domes. ‘Look, a blue dome is gliding over our heads. Seems so near.’

September spoke without any fear, and then came Rain’s cry:

‘Don’t eat! Try not to eat.’

But all of us, except her, had already swallowed some flakes. For we were hungry and the hunger increased with the sight of food. I knew from previous experience that sleep came soon after eating, and after that the feeling of satiation. I was therefore afraid of sudden drowsiness, not so much for myself as for September, whom each one of the boxes tried to intercept.

‘September, take my hand,’ I said in a loud whisper, and she stopped looking at the sky. Then her hand, warm and moist, touched mine. Now I had them both at my side, Rain and September. ‘If you get sleepy,’ I spoke into her ear, ‘don’t worry, September, I shall be near you. And I’ll try to keep awake.’

‘Are they moving closer, Dover?’ September didn’t mean the domes, I knew that.

‘No, of course not. The boxes never move. They are stationary.’

‘But someone must have put them here in a line.’

‘Yes, September, someone did that. But, can’t you see, they are all fixed to the ground.’

In accordance with all my recent misjudgements, I was, of course, proved wrong, and very soon. The boxes shifted during the night. We had fallen asleep, as we expected, after eating the sky flakes, but Rain managed to hold the three of us together. I woke up, feeling the pull of their hands on my belt. They pulled the hooks to warn me at once of what had happened.

Our feet were propped up against the thresholds of two boxes. Their doors couldn’t swing because our legs had, in fact, prevented them from moving altogether.

And now the thresholds prevented the feet from shifting down.

‘September, my good girl, you are stuck.’ I heard Leeds, but couldn’t see him at all. Not even his turret of a neck. ‘Lift up your feet, Dover, just as you can always lift up your heart. First your left, then your right, go on! there’s a brave lad. Oh, dear, you are positively glued on.’

‘Leeds, please come and help us. I feel so heavy. Where are you, Leeds!’

September had drops of sweat on her forehead and they were rolling over her eyelids. Yet she didn’t dare to wipe them off in fear of losing Rain’s hand or mine.

‘Actually, I am standing behind the boxes. I mean on this side, the proper side, that is. Must have walked in my sleep. Silly Leeds, always doing the right thing when no one is looking. Should I have said “modest Leeds” perhaps? Well, never mind.’

‘Please, come here. You are my husband, the father of my child.’ I didn’t like this kind of plea being used by my second wife.

‘The child hasn’t been born yet,’ I said rather primly. And I tried to pull my feet out, one at a time. No, it didn’t work.

‘Bang! you’ve hit the nail on the head. Old sulk Dover has made a medical observation. Quite valid, too. Speaking for myself as a prospective father, I insist on a hygienic birth. That’s what the boxes are for, among other things.’

‘She won’t go in,’ Rain spoke with admirable assurance and calm. She didn’t give a warning, she stated a fact in the future present, as Leeds would have put it, or I myself for that matter. I turned to Rain, rubbing my cheek against the sand, and apologized to her, to September, and to the sand under my recumbent body:

‘Don’t blame me too much for taking you out of that little island. But it was also dangerous for our circle, in a different way. We had to leave sooner or later.’

I received a blue smile from the depth of her eyes.

‘Of course, we had to leave. The tree rock was made sacred through rebirth and sacrifice. Besides, Dover, you entrusted the seeds to me. They were meant to be cast elsewhere.’

The seeds. Yes, I had forgotten about them. Two small grains only, so hard and black. Confidence of a childish sort returned to me.

‘Leeds, you belong to my circle!’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t be there. Now, don’t play one of your pranks.’

‘What pranks! I can’t cross the line. And September should be by her husband’s side. Just push your pretty legs a bit farther into the box, and you’ll glide straight into hubby’s arms.’

‘Don’t listen to him, September.’ Saying this, Rain first moved her elbows, then bent her legs. In a second she was up and looking at us.

‘If you stay there, Leeds. . . .’ Her voice became translucent, as it was on the islet.

‘If you prefer to stay there, you’d better cling to that box with all the strength you have.’

I raised my neck and could just see his, jutting out, a turret misplaced between two boxes.

‘Where is Joker?’ I asked Rain.

‘Safe. Sitting in the sea. He chose the best place for protection.’

‘Fishing for Sailor, eh?’ the turret moved and fired a volley of chuckles.

‘My legs!’ September cried from the ground.

‘Press your back hard against the sand. I am coming.’ And Rain took September under the arms and dragged her away from the box. Then she helped me. Her strength flowed into my limbs and I was able to sit, then kneel.

‘The pain,’ I said, ‘here in my toes.’

‘My whole body aches,’ September whispered.

Before the boxes swung their doors wide out and pushed forward, we were some twenty yards away from them, and I could feel the cool shadows of clouds passing overhead. No domes: we stood outside their protection or supervision, whichever meaning we attached to them at that dangerous moment. I watched Rain in front of us, the weight of her body resting on one leg which was in the humid sand up to the ankle.

‘I am ready,’ she said.

I didn’t understand her intention. The shifting boxes, however, puzzled me far more, as well as those who guided them from above, if guidance were needed. The control might also come from underground, through the tubes, metal discs or micro-screens. Still, whoever and whatever manoeuvred the boxes, he and it couldn’t be found inside them, for there was nothing inside, except smells, sounds and pictures.

I glanced beyond Rain. That neck of Leeds was still jutting out between two boxes, an observation turret or—what? How stupid of me, Leeds could have done some of the tricks. Pushing, too. He had been so efficient a pusher when he ran on the outside of our circle during the journey to the tree. Yet he had certainly not assembled several hundred boxes along the full stretch of the Safety Zone to welcome us on our return.

‘Look at the sand, Rain, they are pushing at it again,’ September said. Rain nodded and raised her right hand. It swung out in a wide opening gesture, very much like one of those doors, and the sun seemed to illuminate each finger separately. This lasted a moment longer than the flickering of light, or maybe the eyes retained Rain’s gesture in a concave mirror of suspense.

Then the earth surface answered with a double thunder. It split, and a zigzagging line began to run along the boxes. The doors in front tripped one by one over it and fell down flat, the line sliced triangles under some boxes and they vanished in a whistle of dust. The clouds over our heads, the natural clouds, now appeared to be lower, they were sliding over one another, the dark over the grey in the likeness of the coloured domes.

‘September, Rain, Joker!’ I cried, stretching my hands out, no longer a binder of hoops but a loose axis in a broken wheel. ‘What is happening to us? What is. . . .’

‘The seeds, Dover!’ I heard Rain’s triumphant voice. ‘I have thrown them into the mouth of the earth, and look, Dover, how hungry she is!’

The earth was hungry below its bare trampled surface, between its veins of ore, within the subterranean channels of extinct water; once the soil had swallowed the first seeds, it wanted food to nourish them, it had to twist its own entrails, turn its skin inside out and devour the moist gravels in the sand.

I saw metallic discs rising like crazy moons into the sky. I saw tubes and cables chasing the cracks which split the surface, or was it the other way round? Then a large reinforcement of boxes slowly crawled in. Near the front line they accelerated. Dust obscured shapes. Only doors were heard creaking, whining, slamming.

‘Cousins, it looks like a door-to-door stampede.’ Wherever he was hiding, Leeds certainly sounded true to himself, a wit for all occasions. To my annoyance September tried to call him through the shuffling noises; now she wanted to be by his side, regardless of danger.

Finally, when the cracking surface trapped the new advance of boxes, the low clouds opened over our heads, and the rain, real rain, poured into the thirsty stomach of the earth. It swelled and belched out the hygienic contraptions inserted by man.

‘I can see a tunnel going right into the Underground,’ said a gurgling sort of voice. ‘And if this rain doesn’t stop, it will sure drown a terrible lot of kid brothers in all those tube trains.’ Joker wasn’t joking: he believed that children came from underground.

2

Had any of the skymen wanted a report from me as leader of a broken circle, I would have reported two human species lost, one gained, and the sudden reappearance of a natural species, hitherto totally extinct in the British Isles. I think I would then describe the phenomenon in some detail.

It happened during the torrential rain, when exactly I couldn’t tell, because mindful of my responsibilities, I protected my two wives with my whole body.

Otherwise, they might have been washed down into one of the crevices, for the ground was flooded and the stones slippery. I took the emerging phenomenon for a mushroom.

One knew so much about mushrooms, those in the earth and those in the sky, from the old micro-documents always available for viewing in any of the boxes. But no fungus could have grown that quickly and that high unless it exploded into the atmosphere.

In no time the thing was taller than September, later it became twice my height and size, finally it spread its top somewhere within a thinning cloud.

‘Isn’t it beautiful and real, my tree?’ Rain combed her wet hair with one hand and with the other pointed to the sky. ‘It’s even more real, Dover, than the rain from the clouds.’

Then she and September embraced the tree. They needed their four arms to encompass the trunk.

‘A real tree

Sees only me.’

September laughed at her nursery rhyme, but it was truly meant for a child. For the same night, after the rain had stopped, she gave premature birth to a very normal child. She laid the boy in a hollow scooped out by the gushing water under the first giant tree.

On the screens inside the boxes we had, of course, learnt all about the birds and the bees, though we were not expected to see a single living specimen outside. It was supposed to be nine months for a human cocoon. But September’s pregnancy lasted only nine days. Her womb must have been as much starved as the belly of the earth. They both rushed into growth, feeding themselves on whatever they could find and devour within their dormant flesh. The first tree, Rain’s cedar, skipped centuries, leaping bough after bough into its own glory of being a tree. It required but a few urgent hours to place its crown on a cloud. This is the beginning of my reign, it rustled to the light and moisture on its branches.

Other trees followed the ascension of the cedar, but they grew with lesser urgency, and took days instead of hours to reach the sky.

As for the human losses, they were presumed rather than final.

Joker had swum from wet to wetter, out of the sea into the flood, which he didn’t think funny at all; then he got stuck in the frame of a shattered box, plucked some courage and looked farther than his feet. He saw the opening of a tunnel, degutted from cables and pipes, and informed us about his discovery. Unable to move back, Joker pondered over the continuing splatter above and below, then passed his worry on to me.

No, he didn’t want any more kid brothers to drown, especially in the Tube. Water would travel on the Circle Line, just think of that. Would it hurt to dive, he asked me, into a watery sort of tunnel, and before I could say yes, he jumped, crashing that frame. And September told me she would miss him very much, because Joker was such a recent husband.

Leeds had vanished between complaints, so to speak. He first complained about the boxes. There he was most loyally behind them, and they treated him abominably. He got pushed around, had his neck and buttocks knocked on an average by two doors per second; moreover, when he finally decided to take refuge in one of the stationary boxes, he couldn’t squeeze in at all. Disgraceful negligence in high places, he grunted, they should have been designed to fit a chap who had put on some weight. He had no idea that it could ever happen to him, meaning, of course, the insufficient size of the box, not his prodigious enlargement.

Well, so that’s that, Leeds observed amidst the swishing strands of rain; he had to lodge a formal complaint. A chap needed reassurance from the authorities on whose side he had always tried to be; didn’t he say often enough that all was well under the domes, despite overcrowding? Good food, heated air, convenient tubes everywhere, micro-screens, micro-entertainment, sex whenever jostling didn’t interfere, and many other goodies free of charge, free of work, free of old age.

But—justice had to be invoked once in a while, when a chap wanted to be reassured that he was well looked after, boxes or no boxes. Oh, yes, he read in a screen-microbook about previous complaints. Not very many, no, just one or two, and the skymen considered them with great care. On whose side did he think the skymen were, I asked Leeds. On justice’s side, of course, Leeds replied. And after slapping his belly to indicate determination, he wobbled into the debris of the hygiene boxes, and left us under the rain clouds in the Safety Zone, before the birth of the cedar and the birth of his own child.

Now he was probably whirling in the crowds, a barrel with a turret, set in this precious jewel, this multitudinous England. No matter what might yet befall Leeds and his complaint, I presumed him to be a returnable loss.

Meanwhile, I seemed to have regained my central position; I had a smallish circle with two wives and a baby, no male intruders, and giant trees formed our natural line of defence. The boxes had withdrawn from the Safety Zone altogether; the warning signs lay either broken or buried in the sand; the domes ceased to provide us with food outside their range. We were, in fact, on our own.

It amused me, while resting in the shade of the cedar, to think that the Safety Zone had reversed its original meaning and become a safe place, after all. I experienced a curious sense of freedom, limited by the zonal area and yet unlimited in the new growth.

The two black seeds had stirred a revolt under the surface. They must have attracted bits of matter from the deeper layers, and cleansed them of lifeless dust. New roots groped their way towards the soil, thin, timid and yet obedient to the instinct that pushed them up.

Rain was our food taster; she walked about under her trees, she walked along the seashore, she bent over green wisps sprouting from the earth, she buried her fingers in the moist patches probing the sand for mushrooms, real mushrooms juicy with real rain. We ate whatever she chose for us; we often had pains twisting the bowels and would retch the new food out with more pain. But slowly, day after day, we were acquiring the knowledge and the need of natural nourishment. And I liked drinking fresh rain-water from Rain’s cupped hands. I also desired her, because now she had cedar fragrance on her skin and the embracing warmth of sea waves in her touch and voice.

‘September wants you,’ she told me when I openly asked her to join her body with mine. ‘She is the mother of many children to come.’

‘Why not you, Rain?’ I embraced her, breathing in the fragrance of growth which she absorbed from the air of this safe Safety Zone. ‘You are also my wife.’ Then I added meekly in a whisper: ‘My first wife.’

‘I know, Dover. But now I stand within two generations, surrounded by trees born in my sign and by men born in the sign of September.’

‘Rain in the centre of a double circle.’

‘You might call it that, Dover. It has the roundness which needs no sides.’

But Rain neither played the part of a priestess nor suggested by her behaviour that our legs and bellies rubbed off purity from love each time they met in an act. On the contrary, she encouraged September to invite my desires, she taught her postures and signs so that her body would be as flexible as ten women together displaying love to a man.

‘Remember, remember, you held my head, September,’ she said and smiled. ‘I will hold yours today and see love with your own eyes.’

Rain knelt and drew September’s head to her breasts; she told her to embrace my neck with her legs and September did that, staring at me until Rain closed her eyes. It was Rain’s mouth speaking the caresses of September, and it was September’s distance under her shut eyelids which ended deep between the limbs of Rain. Linked together, they did possess me both with one body and one awareness.

‘We are not jealous of each other,’ Rain said after the act, and September confirmed this with a kiss between the breasts. ‘Why should Leeds or Joker matter to you, Dover? We are all sharers of the same beginning, chosen perhaps by the child tree, perhaps tossed about by coincidence.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind Leeds. He has far less power than I thought.’

‘What is power?’ asked September. To which a quick answer came. It was visual and suspended like a threat. Along the line where the clouds seemed to be edged with the colours of the domes, a winding script appeared. It resembled the characters inscribed on the rock, which Sailor had called Chinese, but soon the script loosened and shaped itself into large letters.

Contaminated area below. Beware of trees.

The letters flickered in red, in green and violet, and when they became red again, they were suddenly switched off, and I saw the nearest domes intensify their colours.

‘They’re coming this way. And they will drop nice flakes, mium, mium.’ The

‘mium’ was a marital borrowing from Leeds. September always welcomed the sight of approaching domes, for she thought and dreamt of food since the days of her pregnancy.

‘They look pointed and sharp: I said to Rain, expecting that she would be able to explain.’

‘They are coming down: Rain answered. ‘No, they’re going up again.’

‘It’s a new attack on us. Leeds went to report, he’s their informer.’

‘No, Dover, they are informed all the time. They don’t need Leeds. The domes won’t attack us.’

‘And why not, Rain?’

‘Because they’re coming to destroy my trees.’

At this moment the pointed edge of the green dome stood at the height of the cedar. It could cut off its crown in one slicing motion.

‘Rain, the cedar!’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Let’s make the cedar one of us. He is one of us.’

And we encircled the tree and moved around it, faster and faster. Then Rain told us to jump whenever we completed a new circle. We jumped and ran, and both motions created a dance. Our arms felt shorter as the trunk thickened, but our ears heard better and higher, up to the thudding noise at the top of the tree.

With one big knock, the cedar pierced the green dome and it burst, not into pieces, but into colours. They seemed to cascade through the twigs and the needles. When the broken colours dispersed or melted on the ground, I heard birds. The dome like a huge cage released them into the clouds. Then we saw a monkey shape on a thick bough. It could speak, however, and said peevishly:

‘What a brutish tree! It nearly split my bottom.’ And by his bottom we recognized him at once.

Cousin Leeds was climbing down.

3

‘Poetically speaking’—this was certainly a new beginning for Leeds—‘this is the cat of heaven. No, September dear, you shouldn’t call him the skycat, it’s not seemly. I mean once you’ve been up there. Puss, puss, puss. Here he is.’

‘Come to me, cat,’ Rain said and the cat sat on her foot. It was black, sleepy and purring with luck.

The cat must have climbed down after the birds or after Leeds, who was dotted with their droppings. For us the cat was indeed a fabulous creature, an exile from heaven.

I observed Leeds while he talked: much of his prodigious belly had subsided. Either this was the result of his mislodged complaint or he had slimmed rapidly during his climb down.

‘Did you see the skymen, Leeds? And, Leeds, what did they look like?’

September had a wife’s right to question an absentee husband.

‘Well. . . .’ I knew that ‘well’ of Leeds followed by a thoughtful pause. He was going to be statistically evasive; figures, percentages, differentials, but nothing concrete.

‘Well, you might ask whether likeness, any likeness, comes into your question to start with. Like, but like what? what being our operative differential. Is, for instance, number two like two in two thousand and twenty-two, or is it rather unlike two in the two-two-two context? Incidentally, what I am about to say may be of some relevance: there are two skies. Strange that I should have been going on like that about two and twos. Yes, the second sky can roughly be described as a sky above or below the first sky. It depends on how you apply the optical calculus. On the average, a middle-aged inhabitant of this island—and middle-aged we all are for obvious reasons—well—as I was saying. . . .’

‘Leeds,’ I interrupted him, ‘reality precedes similarity. Do the skymen exist at all?

Answer yes or no.’

‘They do and they don’t, you see. It’s the way the surface people think of them in these overcrowded conditions. I’ve heard rumours, though.’

‘What rumours, Leeds?’ I wouldn’t let him wriggle out.

‘Well—it is tentatively suggested that there are three skymen only: one with a beard, the other some kind of bird, and the third is beardless and birdless, a skywoman probably.’

‘To whom did you present your complaint?’

‘My complaint! Oh, that. I went to Durham, got a lift up to the sky, and there I pressed first a button, then a knob, then a button on a knob, and finally a magnetic rail whisked me a few miles to a spot where I had to speak into a microphone. I recorded my complaint, got a receipt, heard it played back, liked the recording very much, and that was that.’

‘Leeds,’ I said, ‘there is no such place as Durham.’

‘There was, my dear fellow, look at some old map.’

‘Who gave you a lift to the sky then?’

‘A lift, of course. Don’t you know what a lift is! A thing whizzing up, on rails too, but fixed vertically. It’s all quite easy, really.’

‘And the traffic shadows we used to see through the domes! Tell us about them.’

September was curious and willing to believe everything Leeds chose to say.

‘Rails, my dear, magnetic rails, and they cling to your feet while they transport you from knob to knob. Amazing how simply that sky-zone is run, I mean the other side of the domes. Nothing but knobs. A few birds here and there, and. . . .’ He paused and scratched his neck.

‘And the cat,’ Rain whispered for him.

‘He was miaowing, though, all the time, miaowing to be let out. You know what cats are.’ Then he quickly changed the subject. ‘I must tell you, cousins, I was appointed interim supervisor of emergency evacuation, should such an emergency arise. Again it’s this frightful overcrowding, you know, especially now that the Safety Zones have had to be considerably widened. Why, you may ask. Because of these blasted trees. They make the place look rather dark, don’t they? So unhygienic, too.’ Leeds sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose with disapproval and surveyed the white clouds above the cedar.

‘Have you seen my Joker anywhere?’ September asked.

‘A brave lad, but somewhat reckless. Fancy plunging into the Underground at a time when it was being flooded. Which reminds me. Down there they’ve already had an emergency evacuation. At least twenty train-loads of adolescents, all senior age group fortunately, had to be surfaced in a hurry. I saw the mess and the bulge. From the lift.

You couldn’t squeeze in your little finger anywhere between Durham and Dundee. A population bulge at the rate of seven surfacing heads per second. Poor Joker, he probably got stuck half-way down when the big pushup started.’

From the direction of the sea came a boy with dark hair, and Leeds, much intrigued, put on the airs of an interim supervisor. He gave the boy an eyeful of attention.

‘Too young to be here. They surfaced him by mistake. What is he holding in his hands?’

‘Fish,’ said the boy. And September echoed him with the gayest childlike laughter I ever heard from her lips.

‘What’s so funny?’ Leeds stopped being an interim supervisor.

‘You, Leeds. It’s our child. He grew up so fast in the first week that I had to feed him with stalks, roots, bulbs, anything which the earth was growing at the same time.’

‘Still, he’s much too young to be here.’ Then Leeds muttered half-hopefully:

‘He’s called after me, I presume?’

‘No, Leeds,’ I said. ‘His name is Sky because he was the first to be born under the open sky.’ I sounded more solemn than I intended.

‘Really, Dover, you should have waited for my return. Anyway, he’s far too young to have a name of his own. A temporary number would have done just as well.

Really, Dover, I am surprised at you.’

My turn to be surprised at Leeds came a week later. He said he didn’t feel very well. He had run out of the emergency supply of flakes, the sea air didn’t agree with him, he was putting on weight, and each tree shade annoyed him with a chill or a draught. No, he couldn’t possibly stay with us. As for September, she had become impossible with her demands, Leeds said, nothing but copulation and birth, no other interests, so boring for a man who had big emergencies entrusted to him.

Sky had tried to play with his father on the beach and told him a few things about fishing, but Leeds couldn’t concentrate, the smell of fish turned his stomach, and not once did he use Sky’s name.

‘Not a very bright boy, I must confess,’ Leeds said to me.

‘Are you going to lodge a complaint with September or with me!’ I teased him when he had grumbled himself into silence.

‘Oh, Dover, my good man, you wouldn’t understand.’

I left him reclined on the ground outside the cedar’s shade and the next time I saw him he was on all fours, fiddling with a washed-out piece of wood. Then he took out a short black tube, placed it under his eyebrow, and after a while inky lettering appeared on the board. It said: No exit. Closed until further notice.

‘What’s that!’

Leeds looked up startled, and said:

‘One of the emergency regulations, my dear chap.’

I didn’t wish to assert my authority. Even less did I want to quarrel. Besides, a real splashing rain would soon obliterate the sign. Those clever inscriptions weren’t indelible, we had learnt recently. Let him enjoy his illusions; I was, in fact, the man who supervised the new Safety Zone. Neither my first nor my second wife bothered to read Leeds’s fixture. They ignored old warning signs and remnants of boxes, and anything else that belonged to the artificial, dome-protected existence. Things growing, things smelling of the sea and rain water, things flapping in the trees—these absorbed their curiosity.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The trees kept me awake. A few hours later, the cat of heaven, as Leeds called him, started miaowing. I went to search for him. I found Leeds pulling the cat by its tail. A transparent wall seemed to be resting on his turret of a neck, and behind him on the other side of the wall, Sky struggled with a sack or a net. A strange bubbly light like a foam both illuminated the boy from below and seemed to suck him into itself. A large metal disc lay near by. Leeds was forcing Sky to go underground.

Too late, I thought, I couldn’t get through to rescue him. But the cat bit Leeds and managed to free himself. Leeds howled as the cat of heaven burrowed the earth to escape under the closing wall. Now I knew why the wall came that far down. It was, in fact, a dome of such enormous dimensions that it could seal off the middle of the island, and keep the multiplying trees, plants, mushrooms and us, of course, outside in the open. No exits for those under the cupola. Closed until further notice. That’s what Leeds meant by his emergency. But he had sinews of steel in that neck of his to support the wall before it finally touched the ground.

‘Leeds, have you no pity? It’s your child.’

‘He’s contaminated with life.’ He answered through the chink under that plastic weight. ‘I’m trying to save him. He must be cleansed. Your real rain does, in fact, stain.

Remember, Dover, remember, next time you lie on September.’ He laughed horribly, a monstrous Atlas carrying the dome on his neck. ‘Did you say Atlas?’ Leeds spat with each word at my thought.

If I were Rain, I would have prayed then to the child tree; if I believed that the skymen were at least on the side of justice, I would have implored them to be just; if I were then told that the cat had the luck of heaven on his black fur, I would have invoked the cat’s name. All I could do and feel was to stare with hatred at that treacherous invader of my circle.

The foaming light rose higher and lost its liquid thickness. I saw the boy Sky half propped up, then something pushed him away from the luminous foam. A wig-like mop of hair emerged. crinkling inside the same substance and a voice snorted out of it. It was the best impatient snort ever produced by Joker, my true brother, my brother-in-law, my brother under the domes and the real sky.

‘What the hell is it?’ A bubble bath or something. Couldn’t get out of that stinking tunnel.’

‘Joker, take care! Joker, the wall!’ I shouted, now crouching to get hold of the descending dome.

‘Ah, cousin Leeds! He’s a bloody awful cousin if you ask me. And who’s that!’

Sky grabbed Joker’s thigh and helped himself to stand on his feet.

‘It’s the boy Sky.’

‘What, a young skyman in the flesh? Blimey!’

‘Help him, Joker.’

‘He’ll sure help me, if he’s a real boy skyman.’

And they helped each other. Joker bashed Leeds on the head. ‘That’s for pushing Sailor into the water,’ I heard, and another bash followed. Meanwhile Sky was pushing a boulder into the space between the dome and the hard, flat ground. What strength he had; all that stupendous quick growth must have wound coils of energy in his arms and legs.

Then they both dragged Leeds to the tunnel. The job was done when they put the metal lid over the opening. The foam of light disappeared under the disc together with cousin Leeds.

‘That’s not the end of him,’ I muttered with a prophet’s customary caution.

As soon as Joker and Sky had crawled out of the cupola, the final stampede began. People pushed, hit and trampled one another, they were carried, trailed, held under the arms, held upside-down; some sat astride necks or linked arms, a few mounted the wretches who were on all fours and tried to ride on them. The commotion ended flatly, the foreheads, the noses, the palms of the hands pressing against the translucent obstacle.

Thousands of human insects, with limbs intertwined or broken, squealed and buzzed on the enclosed jewel of a land, unable to leave its surface by sliding off into the sea or flying up to the clouds. Through the wall they could see the trees against the sky and our horrified eyes, distant and safe, hiding in the greenery. There wasn’t any point in calling to them: they wouldn’t even hear our uneasy sympathy.

‘We’ll be afloat any minute now,’ Joker said. ‘Our surface, you know, was protected below by a huge disc the size of this whole ruddy island, and they’ve just removed it to flood or maybe to save the Underground, one never knows what those skymen are up to. Your guess is as good as mine, Dover.’

I didn’t attempt a guess. The island was already moving, slowly, smoothly, probing the depth with musical echoes. We joined our hands, ten hands in all, as in the beginning of my circle. And Joker was telling us what he had seen in the Underground.

The air on our faces grew warmer and the colours in the clouds changed from grey to yellow, green and blue. Rain’s lips moved as she was shaping silent words.

Perhaps she had some secrets to tell her cedar. The circle veered down the sandy slope towards the sea. Joker told Sky to peer into the water. He wouldn’t do it himself. And Sky put his head down, clutching the edge of the land.

‘It’s a floating island all right, isn’t it, Sky? Just like the raft Sailor and I wanted to build.’ And Joker became silent and gloomy.

Now Sky was talking:

‘I can see roots under our island, red, violet, very beautiful and so long.’

‘Those are Rain’s trees, Sky,’ said September. ‘They will keep the balance and steer the island for us.’

‘And I can see another sky, mother. A sky in the water.’

‘It’s you, my child. You are reflected in the second sky.’

It was Rain who first noticed the sudden change inside the cupola. It became completely dark, a huge black diamond surrounded with a green and yellow strip.

‘He’s switched off the lights for the emergency.’ Nobody asked me whom I meant, and I didn’t want to speculate whether the closed dome was already empty or filled to the top, choking in the final solution. For how long was this monster to keep us dark company while we floated away, from the future into the sky?

‘Rain,’ I whispered, ‘pray for the safety of our voyage.’

She didn’t reply. I only heard Joker calling the sun patches which swayed like rafts on the waves.

‘Sailor, Sailor! ahoy!’

Underground

1

And there he was, gaily striding along the King’s Road in his new bowler hat, with a Siamese cat on his shoulder, one day Patrick, another day Boris, it didn’t matter which, for his numerous chums knew both his names and called him hello Patrick! Boris, how are you? hi, Boris Patrick! He was, in fact, a well-known character, not only in the King’s Road and Fulham Road, but also within a one-mile radius of the Albert Memorial.

Naturally, the cat attracted most attention, and children would always try to pull the silk leash which dangled at the level of Patrick’s knees. They soiled his trousers with ice cream and chocolate. The bowler hat gave him the air of a young man doing rather well in the City, a bit eccentric perhaps, but he could afford that as much as the hours spent away from his office. To maintain his prosperous panache he bought himself a new bowler every other month and as often changed the style of wearing it to baffle the ignorant clerks.

Then one chum said near the fountain nude in Sloane Square:

‘Patrick, you should have blue eyes to match your Siamese.’ This set him thinking. Naturally, he couldn’t change the colour of his eyes to please friends, but he did the next best thing. He dyed his hair blue, Bulgarian blue to be precise, after his first mum, bless her operatic lungs. The bowler had to go, of course; never mind the City, he wasn’t all that attached to the idea of big lolly.

Patrick’s blue hair, however, achieved far more than he intended: now people stared at him first, next they noticed the cat, finally the silk leash. Even children seemed less keen on pulling the leash, because the hair made them say ‘golly!’ and run away.

Policeman never said golly or anything like that, but they were rather nasty, looking him up and down. Once when Patrick was carrying an empty case to have the lock mended, a policewoman asked him to open it in the street. He nearly refused as the street happened to be in the World’s End where he and his dad were quite well known. She found nothing inside, apologized for the inconvenience, and excused herself by saying:

‘I thought you were Lady Pauline. She’s a famous shop-lifter and was caught at Peter Jones wearing a blue wig.’

Then a big policeman with a squint and a Welsh accent accused him of soliciting outside the Classic cinema while they were showing Night and Day for the second time.

Patrick pushed Miss Siam’s whiskers straight into that squint, so outraged he was, and the man became very polite afterwards, and even made an immoral proposal himself on the steps to the police station.

Queers or homopathos, as Patrick nicknamed those with gloomy faces, accosted him in public lavatories, partly on account of his blue hair, partly because of his foul sublimations which, however, erupted at unpredictable times. There he stood dangling his thing and being watched by a gloomy homopatho from either side, when suddenly he felt peculiar all over, and a horrible taste filled his mouth, so he had to get those mucky words out as quickly as possible. They had a dynamic effect on the homogloomies gathered at this lavatorial reunion: they either rushed at Patrick, or rushed outside, pattering up the stairs.

Now and again he allowed some nice elderly gentleman to adore his bum and take him out to the cinema, the Zoo or Battersea pleasure gardens, but, in fact, he didn’t much like that kind of sport. The phrase was not his, but dad’s. Augustus discussed such matters with him frankly, as it should be between real chums, and the army so-and-so days were usually recalled on these occasions.

‘One of my rifle-cleaning sergeants, you know, would always say: “Bad for piles, good for constipation.” So, if I were you, Patrick, I wouldn’t go on a holiday with that barrister chum of yours. The food in the South of France, my boy, is on the oily side. Ho-ho-ho!’

And Augustus followed his laughter with a firm pat on Patrick’s head. Whenever this happened his father seemed to be surprised that the head was higher than he expected. ‘Are you still growing up or something?’ Patrick was almost twenty-one and his height remained stationary. He knew that, because he measured himself once a week against the door of his daddy’s bed-sitter, and marked the place with blue chalk.

Being a friendly boy and proud of knowing practically everybody in two S.W.

districts, he couldn’t help it if a few homopathos were after him for weeks. When they became too attached to his bum, he resorted to the same explanation.

‘Sorry about that. Had too much sex in childhood, you see. Would you like to meet a psycho-analyst friend of mine to discuss this particular attachment with him? It isn’t really expensive, you know, when you compare it with the price of cigarettes. Two guineas per session, reduced fee, but I’m afraid you have to go as far as the Finchley Road. Horrid street, isn’t it?’ And he gave the man his most charming, irrefutable smile.

The psycho-analyst friend varied from situation to situation.

And Patrick wouldn’t dream of inflicting a financially irresponsible chum on any of them. They worked so hard, listened for hours and hours to all sorts of cases, and foul sublimations, and to occasional snoring as well. He knew them all: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, neo-Freudians, Jungo-Catholics and Sindrians, too.

Sindra remained his best lady chum. She had made a big name for herself after treating Patrick for five years, 1,440 guineas in fees, discounting two fortnights each year for her holidays. Sindra was worth every quid out of his daddy’s wads, and daddy never bothered to count the total sum.

She did, oddly enough, marry Doctor Patho, Vera’s friend with the thick American glasses, and went about calling herself Mrs. Whitestones which didn’t suit her beautiful Indian lips at all. She must have come to the same conclusion a couple of years later, because she divorced the bulging glasses and set up an amicable menage with a certain Scotsman who bred greyhounds for dog-races. Sindra discussed the whole thing with Patrick during a long walk in Regent’s Park; she couldn’t find a more understanding listener in the whole of London than her prize patient, the celebrated piss-boy and nocturnal Tubewalker. She titillated his heart with darlings, and Patrick, like an affectionate good boy that he was, reciprocated Sindra with darlings. Sometimes, in living memory of that five-year course, he would say ‘Sindra-mum’, but it sounded a bit like laying a wreath on the tombstone of Dolly-mum.

Apparently things had been written about Patrick Boris; he had passed from pads to files, from script to print, and if he had known how to use modern reference books, he could have looked himself up. His reading habits, however, were desultory. Sometimes he picked up a Soho classic and refreshed his visual memory of the words he used to spell out in chalk and in public, but on the whole he found printed letters a frightful bore for the eyes to follow. Like his psycho-analytical mentors, he preferred the oral tradition and would, if asked by a drunken chum in a pub, recite, intone or shout the whole glossary of psychiatry, from Freud to Sindra and back, which for a backward boy was some feat of memory.

The short list of Patrick’s mummies required nothing of this kind from memory.

Dolly-mum upset his recollections in a different way altogether. He therefore played a conversational game with his father as though she were still living in her doll house, and Augustus were Boris and not daddy ho-ho.

‘And how is good old Dolly-mum these days!’ Patrick asked on Dolly’s sixtieth birthday, imitating his father’s tone to perfection. Augustus sat up, knocking his ancient headboard which now had only grease stains and no flowers. Each time this obsessional question reached out to him in his own voice, Augustus the father hit some object next to his head.

‘Ah, Dolly! good old Dolly. She’s fine, ho-ho-ho! she likes living in the country.’

As soon as Augustus said ‘in the country’, he seemed to be puzzled why on earth he had said it. Patrick knew his father loathed cottages, cows, cow-dung; the very idea of spending a week-end in the country made him sick.

‘Is she still in Dorset, father!’

‘Ah, Dorset! Did you say Dorset, Patrick!’

‘I said the cottage covered with a square, thick turf and a marble chimney on top.’

‘Turf? Ah—’ And here Augustus dried up all of a sudden. He knocked the headboard again and looked horrified, as if he had touched a cold marble slab. ‘Ah—’ he stared at the telephone directories, under which the matches usually got stuck. ‘Where the hell. . . .’

‘You’re not lit, dad.’

‘I know. Fetch me the phone books like a good girl.’

And Patrick fetched the volumes, one by one. Then he took a box of matches out of his pocket.

‘Well, dad,’ he said, ‘it’s time we paid a visit to Dolly-mum in the country, you and me, don’t you think so!’

‘The country?’ Augustus bulged his watery eyes. ‘Have I ever told you, Patrick, about my rifle when I was in the army’/’

‘You have, father.’

‘Ho-ho-ho, the good old rifle,’ Augustus inhaled deeply, rested his weary head and puffed out a few rings of smoke. ‘Would you like a quid or two!’

Patrick shook his head violently. He didn’t want that, he wanted to be with Dolly-mum as in the good old days.

2

He didn’t kill her with the potato knife. He only peeled off a bit of her skin. A year later he tried to strangle her with a leather leash he had pinched from Nicky the poodle, but leather wasn’t much good for that kind of thing: it resisted the pull.

Patrick felt very sorry about the attempt and the failure, kissed Dolly’s hands and the place on her throat where the leash had left a slight bruise. They both wept and said nice sweet things to each other. She was his only mum, much nicer really than Vera with her blue hair and her blue-eyed cat; nothing, nothing in the whole world would ever part them, because he was Dolly’s boy, Patrick. Oh, how warm her shaking hand felt on his cheek; how beautifully she sobbed over the tea-pot and one solitary cup with a lipstick smudge as crooked as her lips.

The Indian lady-doctor was changed for a nasty yes-doctor who insisted on clear answers, no-sir, yes-doctor, this no, that yes. Patrick ran away from him, not far, only to Sindra’s place. And Sindra gave his dad a tinkle, and they talked for at least half an hour, while Patrick fiddled with the plastic telephone cord and thought of Dolly-mum.

Every morning Dolly wept at breakfast. She couldn’t swallow a thing, she said, and Patrick like a good boy soaked brown bread for her in tea and in milk. Some she ate, some she threw up straight onto the white tablecloth which Patrick didn’t think polite. He forgave her that as she had forgiven other things.

One day, Dolly-mum had a most unpleasant attack of weeping. She vomited all over the carpet and broke her blue tea-pot which she loved because it had been in the family for so long. This brought more weeping, louder and uglier. She seemed to be making faces at Patrick, now from the top of her nose down, now from her chin upwards.

He became very nervous himself, and thought quickly of two solutions: either something suppler than the leash, one of her stockings for instance, or the risk of ringing up his father, though it was only a quarter to eleven.

He chose the telephone, because it was there, glaring at him with its white dial, and Dolly was wearing both her stockings. Patrick would have disliked pulling them off her legs.

Dolly-mum had a nervous breakdown and was taken to a quiet house in the country. After a few months she returned and there was much talk between his dad and the nasty yes-doctor about Patrick, whether he should see his second mummy or stay away from her. Only a week elapsed, and Dolly herself wanted to be with her sweet boy, she even promised to be very good and not to weep. She didn’t, good old Dolly, and the idyllic reunion lasted three long eventful days.

On the second day Patrick took Dolly-mum to the Zoo by bus. It was his own idea. Augustus the father approved of it and gave him a couple of quid extra for entertainment.

‘Treat the old girl to a lunch somewhere off Baker Street, not too near the Zoo, though; the neighbourhood stinks of monkeys.’ Augustus patted him absentmindedly. ‘A boy of fifteen, you know, should occasionally entertain his lady chums, but don’t go to a pub called “Ye Olde Irelande”—’ he pronounced final e’s, ‘the place stinks of monkeys, too.’

Alas, they couldn’t have lunch because of the parrots, yellow, green, violet, with hooked beaks and screeching hello-voices.

They were perched on twigs and swings, they flapped their wings and stared at you sideways. Dolly-mum stood amidst the cages, getting redder and redder despite the powder she had on her face and the powder she tried to put on. Finally, she gasped, looked sideways at Patrick just like one of the parrots and after another gasp shrieked so loud that an attendant in uniform rushed in and gave her something to smell. Dolly-mum fainted, came to, fainted again at the sight of the parrots, and the whole treat ended for her in a taxi. The fare to South Kensington cost Patrick less than the lunch he was going to give her.

At home he behaved like a real son, rang everybody he could think of to tell them what had happened, then he boiled some milk which she drank gratefully. His dad arrived, made a mess of things by trying to cook a meal; then it was the doctor’s turn to arrive and fuss about the house. Augustus said he would stay the night. He did and fell asleep as soon as he had drunk the last few drops of Dolly’s white port. Patrick took over: he wound the clock, shut the front door, went to the loo, washed and in the end entered Dolly-mum’s bedroom to kiss her good night.

She was asleep, poor dear, and very pretty she looked in her pink nightie with a loose silk scarf round her neck. All day long she wore it, and in bed too, because she felt cold there, Dolly said, ever since they had taken her in the dark car to that dark house in the country. She couldn’t remember where the house was, in Dorset maybe, or in Cornwall.

Patrick untied the scarf to find that place he had once bruised, and to prove that he meant no harm whatsoever, he lay a long, loving kiss there. Dolly-mum opened her eyes, shrieked horribly, jumped out of bed and then through the window, straight onto a small bit of lawn in her back garden. Even if she had wanted to break her neck, she couldn’t possibly have succeeded from that ground-floor window and on that bouncy lawn.

And the poodle barked, and woke Augustus who said brightly: ‘Ah—where am I?

Must have snoozed off in your lap, naughty girl.’ A dark car arrived in the morning, and two strong men carried Dolly-mum in a chair with straps. They took her to another home in the country.

‘Don’t imagine things, Patrick, my boy, she’s living in a lovely cottage with a thatched roof and a cock crowing from the top.’ His father said this a month later, when Patrick had already heard from the rheumatic lady about Dolly-mum’s funeral. She had attended it herself, and the poodle Nicky was with her. ‘I looked for you there, Patrick, but you know how poor my eyes are.’

It was Sindra the beautiful who found out about the cemetery and drove Patrick there in her American car. She wanted him to see for himself that it was all over, the attachment, the compulsion and the guilt. No, he hadn’t caused Dolly’s death, how could he, since she was staying in a home at the time. As for nervous breakdowns, they were nowadays no more unusual than ‘flu, and Sindra sealed her pronouncement with an exotic Indian smile. ‘Oh, what a wonderful shade of green,’ she said to a man who was placing new turf on Dolly-mum’s grave. The old square, moulting at the edges, lay rolled up next to a marble slab which reminded Patrick of one of the chimneys in Queen’s Gate Terrace. No, he wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown, ever.

And during the following six years he had none. He strolled gaily along the Fulham Road, the King’s Road, Queen’s Gate, through parks and squares, his debonair self on top of the world, and only sometimes a tiny-weeny bit below. Patrick was riding towards his twenty-first birthday on the crest of euphoria, and whenever he sank a little, for a day or an hour, it felt like dropping into a pit of depression. So euphoric he stayed on the sea of other people’s troubles. He could be most sympathetic though, when he heard of someone’s breakdown.

‘I’m so sorry, my dear John,’ he said to an elderly acquaintance who had an antique shop in Chelsea, a mistress at the cash-box, a tom-cat upstairs and a wife in a mental home. ‘I didn’t know she’d fallen ill again. Last time I saw you both, she looked so beautifully sunburnt and relaxed.’

‘That must have been Liz.’ He meant his mistress in charge of the cash-box. His wife was no beauty.

‘No, no! it was your charming wife, I am positive, John.’ And Patrick patted him on the back. John knew how useless it would be to tell Patrick that his wife hadn’t been out for seven years.

‘Well, what can one do? Life is hard, Boris, that’s all.’ He tried to get away from Patrick but Patrick wouldn’t let him. No chum of his, however pressed for time, should go uncomforted. Besides, they had cats in common.

‘Are you hard up by any chance? Would you like a quid or two? Please take three.’ And immediately Patrick began rummaging in his pockets.

‘No, thank you very much. Really, I have no financial worries, I assure you, Boris.’

‘Glad to hear it, John. But any time you. . . .’

‘I know, thank you again. Most kind of you.’

‘Look, John.’ Patrick put his arm round the man’s stiff neck and let Miss Siam drop on to the pavement, which the cat did with her usual grace. ‘Listen to me, John, you mustn’t think your beautiful wife is a mental case. Everybody one meets has had a nervous breakdown. It’s quite natural these days like—oh, I don’t know—like having a religious background. You must look at it that way, John. And how’s your cat?’

‘Very well, good-bye Boris.’ The man was off. ‘Give me a tinkle!’ he shouted after John, ‘whenever you feel a bit depressed.’ The next chum Patrick bumped into was euphoric like himself and smelt of beer and whisky.

‘How’s life, Patrick?’

‘Fine, splendid. Just fine.’

‘Your new job all right?’ This puzzled Patrick, for he had no job. But he was always ready to oblige a friend as interested in him as this nice tippler whose name he couldn’t remember. And Patrick mounted the crest of an optimistic wave which would make the conversation flow.

‘Ah—the job! I’ve been asked to take up a post in Coimbra. Teaching English, you know.’

‘Splendid, Patrick—marvellous!’ The drunk chum sounded enthusiastic. Patrick loved it when people were enthusiastic while talking to him. Then he heard: ‘How’s your Portuguese? Excellent, no doubt.’

‘Oh—’ Patrick was taken by surprise but wouldn’t stoop to covering up. ‘Thought they spoke Spanish. Funny that. Well, I’ll know both Spanish and Portuguese in a couple of months, ho-ho-ho!’ His dad’s laugh came in useful on such ambiguous occasions. ‘As a matter of fact—’ he loved supplying facts—’I am taking my G.C.E. exams this June.

Seven subjects at the Ordinary Level, three at the Advanced. Do you think’—he wished he knew the chap’s name—’do you think I should take English at the Advanced Level because of this job in Coimbra?’

Patrick never sat for any examination and had nothing on paper to prove that he could read or write; his education had been entirely private and consisted of hours and hours spent in the consulting rooms of psycho-analysts. Yet he still had his two mummies rocking a little cradle of guilt, and he still startled people by saying he was backward.

‘It’s quite normal these days: Patrick explained. ‘You see both my mothers had a nervous breakdown. It’s natural too. What? Oh, yes, they’re all right now, thank you.’

His first mummy, as a matter of fact, had hers in New York, while she was singing on the stage. Vera’s voice simply caved in, and the opera selected by fate for her breakdown happened to be Boris Godunov. When he heard of this, Boris Patrick bought himself a Siamese cat on a silk leash.

3

‘You shouldn’t have told me about them drowning in the Tube. I shall have a nasty dream, as horrid as that about the turf being peeled off a grave. Have you ever smelt powder in your dreams? I have.’

Patrick was talking to John who had an antique shop full of ricketty junk, with one live mistress at the cash-box. John, like Patrick’s father, had some reminiscences from his remote war days, but preferred to repeat the more horrific ones. This time he described at length how one underground shelter was flooded during the blitz, drowning several children.

‘You’re keen on knowing things about the Tube, Boris. I thought it might interest you as part of history.’

‘Well—you shouldn’t have told me about them drowning, John. It worries me enough to imagine all those tree roots trying to push into the Underground. And the people inside the bottle on that picture about the rush-hour, remember John, it turns my stomach. Now you’ve told me. . . .’

‘It’s from the past, Boris. History is like that, always nasty.’

‘You want me to look after your tom, is that it?’ Patrick spoke hurriedly to obliterate that watery picture of horror. John goggled and sat on a plushy piece of his junk.

‘How did you guess, Boris?’

‘You mentioned your holiday before you started going on and on about the shelter in the Tube.’

‘So I did. Would you be so very kind once more, and Boris. . . .’

Patrick didn’t listen. He would oblige his friend, though there were two things against the tom. He was a rather common and lecherous tom, sure to bother the aristocratic Miss Siam with his sexual attentions; and moreover he wore a collar of twisted leather, more suitable for a poodle on a leash and the sight of such leather upset Patrick’s euphoria.

He had to take Miss Siam to a vet for a monthly check-up, the appointment was fixed for Wednesday. On Monday he went to the Classic cinema and saw a film called Hamlet with Laurence Olivier whom he adored on account of his flaxen hair. He also adored Hamlet, because he was rude to his mother and very sad afterwards. Patrick had a chum at the cinema, most polite and a manager as well; the courteous chum said it was English Lit. as it used to be writ, so Patrick told him that he would most certainly take English Lit. and Hamlet at his next G.C.E. exam. The manager was delighted.

On Tuesday Patrick dyed his hair Scandinavian blond. It took some time because of the blue which the homopatho hairdresser had to paint out for ages. The result seemed to have pleased everybody he passed in the streets; people turned round, a builder from a scaffolding cried ‘Hi, Larry!’, a policeman at the traffic lights dropped his whistle. To show how English Lit. looked on his head, Patrick went to the cinema, impressed the manager and got a free ticket to see those angry scenes again. ‘Lovely,’ said a man next to him in the row and touched his knee. A minute later the hand moved higher, but not as high as his flaxen hair, so disappointed Patrick left the gloomy homopatho and the mother scene. At home he slept with his hair in a net.

The vet passed Miss Siam as fit for any misadventure and this called for a celebration. She would always snooze on public transport, now she needed a good rest after the vet’s prodding, so Patrick decided to give her the treat he once loved as a boy: a double ride on the Inner Circle.

The hour was right for a comfortable journey, the train almost empty, and no bottle-neck drawing reminded Patrick from the opposite wall that things could be otherwise. He relaxed with his feet stretched out, and in her travelling basket Miss Siam purred a seductive welcome to her oriental dreams. From the other end of the carriage a lanky youth approached them and slouched into the seat next to Patrick. Aha—another knee grabber. Patrick was ready to tick him off, but the chap didn’t seem to want any rude sport after all, he just sat and sighed. Patrick looked at him sideways. Must be my age, or a little older; his hair is neither greasy nor dusted with dandruff, but it could do with an occasional rinse. Not blue, no. A funny sort of face, coming out from the chin and sinking into the forehead.

Now the youth started to rub his reddish hands. He put his left one into his mouth, chewed at the fingers for a while, then tried swallowing the whole lot. Since that was impossible, he took his hand out, examined each finger carefully, in case one of them was missing, and gave the drying saliva a powerful lick. He did the same with his right hand, except that he pushed it across Patrick’s seat straight into Miss Siam’s whiskers and waited for her tongue to come out. Patrick would have objected to this as unhygienic for the cat, especially so soon after a medical examination, but something else puzzled him about the chap’s appearance and behaviour.

Where had he seen that face before? He saw hundreds of people, had chums in every district in London, was himself a well-known character in the South-West. True, he was often bad at remembering names, but this face seemed to be reaching him through a dense haze, from somewhere far and drowsy. Well, he could have met the hand-eater in one of his nightmares, at the other end of the sleep tunnel. The best way of finding out was to ask the hand-eater whether he happened to be a chum well met and well lost.

But the anonymous chum forestalled Patrick.

‘Cools the skin,’ he said and made a throttling noise.

‘What?’ Patrick decided to be extra polite in case his memory had slipped up badly, so he corrected himself: ‘I beg your pardon, I didn’t quite catch. . . .’

‘The licking cools the skin,’ the youth explained and withdrew his hand from under Miss Siam’s tongue. Patrick was glad the hand had cooled off in the meantime.

‘Ah—’ Patrick produced his dad’s expression to the best of his abilities. The youth needed no prompting.

‘It’s like this, you see,’ he bent towards Patrick confidentially, ‘I’ve escaped with my skin. Hot that, escaping.’ Then he mumbled something which Patrick failed to catch, partly because of the doors breathing out. Bayswater; three more stations to complete a circle. That word: he muttered it again and it sounded very much like telepatho. Strange, the chap should be speaking Patrick’s special lingo.

‘Telepatho?’ Patrick repeated in a loud voice. The carriage doors were breathing in at that moment. The chap nodded, then rubbed his left hand against the seat.

‘You mean, you tried to electrocute your cock in the telly, or something like that!’

The youth objected with a violent rubbing of his right hand. His line of psychic trouble, he said, was telepathy, which impressed Patrick as much as his new Scandinavian dye had impressed the cinema-goers.

‘Do they lock you up for that?’ he asked, clutching Miss Siam’s basket.

‘They try. But I get away with my skin and hide here in the Tube. It’s okay as long as my telepathic current works. When the power fades, I’m sure in trouble.’

‘Is it fading now?’

‘Not yet, but it might any minute.’

‘What does it do when the current works?’

‘Chum, I can see things above the surface and below; things creeping along now and things which will whirl, jostle and suffocate five hundred years from today.’

‘Golly!’ said Patrick and put a finger deep into his mouth. He forgot the pleasure of being called chum by such an important telepatho.

‘Don’t swallow it,’ said the chum.

‘Oh, no.’ Patrick dropped his hand and rushed a question which tickled his curiosity. ‘Tell me, does it hurt your eyes to see so far ahead?’

‘Not at all. Do I wear glasses?’ Patrick shook his head in a silent no. ‘As it happens, chum, I am longsighted. But those crowds thudding on the surface give me a terrible headache five hundred years too early. Poor island, no free space left to grow a tree, how it weighs on my head, each pair of stamping feet here, boom-boom inside my brain.’

He pressed his temples and Patrick felt a quick pulse of sympathy throbbing in his finger-tips and behind his hot ears. What could he say now, at once, to cheer up a chum, a brother in patho, a traveller on a circle!

‘As a matter of fact,’ he began and the phrase gave him confidence, ‘I am a bit simple in the head myself. On account of my mother being Bulgarian.’

‘What a coincidence, my father was very vulgar, too.’

‘I would like to know your name.’ Patrick at once regretted saying this, because the nameless chum pushed three fingers between his teeth, bit them hard, and replied with visible pain.

‘Don’t you know they’re chasing me from tunnel to tunnel, all over this Underground and the other as well, from Leeds to Durham, from Cardiff to Dover.’

‘It’s terrible, positively frightful, I must say.’ Then Patrick had a most chummy brain-wave. ‘May I call you Boris! I am Patrick—how do you do. I would very much like to call you Boris.’ The chin came forward, the low forehead sank deeper, and the prospective Boris whispered yes. This filled Patrick with brotherly euphoria. Question after question, answer after answer, station after station-they were all going round in circles on the Inner Circle.

‘Boris, you said something about another Underground. It sounded much bigger than this. From Dover to Cardiff, that’s quite a tunnel.’

‘It is. It will be.’

‘What, Boris?’

‘Makes no difference, if you can see ahead.’

‘Wait a minute—’ Patrick wriggled in his seat and nearly pushed off the basket with Miss Siam dreaming blissfully. ‘Do you know what, Boris! I too once saw Leeds instead of Bayswater. A long time ago it was, and my dad looked so funny when I said Leeds. Look, Boris, and here it is, Bayswater—once again.’

The doors were breathing out and in.

‘Leeds,’ said Boris the hand-chewer.

‘Was I telepatho then?’

‘Yea.’ Boris didn’t sound too happy about admitting it. But he brightened up when Patrick with an euphoric gesture offered him a handful of toffees from his right pocket and a crisp quid from a secret slit in the lining of his jacket.

‘Would you like another?’

‘Yea,’ said Boris.

‘Another toffee?’

‘No, thanks.’ The telepatho chum was chewing a big problem. Then he said: ‘I’ll tell you a top secret, Patrick.’

‘How top?’

‘Telepathy top.’

‘That’s awfully nice of you, Boris. I am most grateful.’

‘Wait—’ The doors were opening again: Gloucester Road Station. Boris glanced sideways and telepathically at the immediate present. Another glance, this time round the carriage. ‘Patrick, the secret is: whatever you or anyone else can imagine, exists.’

Patrick gasped. Miss Siam woke up and purred her confirmation from the basket, a mysterious glint in each of her blue eyes. He stroked her throat, a sign that he approved of her approval. They both existed, and so much existed with them, in the underground, on the surface, in the sky, now and wherever the now could be imagined.

‘Boris, how long have you been going round?’ Patrick touched his hand and the skin was cool.

‘Round or around?’

‘I mean here, Boris, on the Inner Circle.’

‘Oh, maybe a week, maybe less.’

‘It’s impossible, Boris. They switch the power off after the last train at night. I know. I once walked in the tunnel.’

‘So what? I did, too. But imagine what happens when you are on the big circle line, under this overcrowded island, from London to London via Cardiff and Durham, people sleeping in the tubes, being flooded, all those kids everywhere. . . .’

‘I can imagine, Boris.’

‘I slept on the Underground platform. That’s not from telepathy. I was a baby.’

‘Why weren’t you drowned then?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Must have been my mum’s fault. She loved me, terribly.’

‘Just like my second mummy,’ said Boris. ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ With brotherly sympathy he surveyed Boris’s features and compared them with his own reflection in the window opposite. ‘Nice to be a bit simple though, don’t you think, Boris! It sort of goes with all those huge stupidities in the world.’

Boris nodded, rubbed his hands, sniffed at Patrick’s hair and remarked that he would prefer it blue any day. Finally, he made a sign that he wanted to leave the train after all. The station was Victoria.

‘Durham,’ Patrick announced, stepping through the sliding doors.

‘Don’t be stupid, it’s Victoria,’ said Boris and helped Patrick with the basket.

They walked up into the main line station. ‘Get me a couple of buns, I haven’t got change.’

Patrick took a pound out of his secret pocket, left Miss Siam with his chum by the telephones and went in search of a trolley. When he returned with three buns and a carton of milk, Boris stood inside a telephone kiosk, pissing, and Miss Siam hung on a string.

The basket lay crushed with Boris’s foot.

Patrick pulled the door, broke the string at the top and the cat started miaowing at once.

‘Why did you do it, Boris!’

‘Don’t ask me. Ask Leeds.’

‘You said yourself it was Victoria Station and not Durham or Leeds, or. . . .’ ‘He does exist, you know,’ Boris answered and pushed the whole bun into his mouth.

Sky

1

I heard about Adam’s illness and his dying from the old trees. They talked at first in whispers, then they intoned a loud chant to the clouds in the first sky and to the light above them. Yet I wouldn’t believe them. I wasn’t sure whether I still understood their speech. But birds, thousands of them, flocked from every nest on my land and with their wings showed me a fluttering path across the sky: in this direction I should go.

And the big lake, Eve’s lake, began to weep, and beat its head against the reeds and the rotting boats of Amo on the shore. I took no food with me, I took no companion, for I had none, and followed the bird signs overhead.

Once I was on my road towards his death, every living thing aided me: the thicket parted and drew in its thorns, the branches hung higher to let me pass unharmed, the moss bedding lay prepared for me whichever place in the forest I chose for my rest; and during my sleep no chill of night in the air touched me, no hooting owl awoke me, and no dream came to disturb my darkened thoughts.

Fruit trees and plants nourished me with the best offerings wrapped up in the freshest leaves; new springs bubbled in the grass reminding the ears that the mouth was thirsty. I had the moon with me when I preferred to walk by night, and I had the sun behind the clouds when I ignored the heat of noon. How long was my journey, how brief was my toil, I could not tell either by the measure of my steps or by the odour of my sweat. The earth seemed to be moving with Eve, its surface small enough now to fit the size of her feet.

The old trees remembered all the sounds of our beginning and strewed their shades with them, so that the music had autumnal colours, red, yellow and brown, the dying colours.

Suddenly, the music of the trees stopped. Silence stood upright like their trunks, from the ground to the sky, a line of arrested motion. Then my name opened within the crown of a cedar, the cedar that had been waiting for me and for this cry.

‘Eve, Eeeve, Eeeeve. . . .’ the cedar was wailing from the top of its height and the cedar’s children lifted the cryan their branches, and swayed it darkly over my staring eyes. ‘Eeeeve!’

No, it couldn’t be their own lament, born from the pain of their roots; it was my husband’s voice calling me, and they carried the name spoken by him, augmenting it in echoes, wider and lower.

‘Adam,’ I spoke within a small frightened thought. ‘Adam.’

He was dead when I reached Cain’s tower on a narrow rocky island. A boat was waiting for me, but I had no need of it, for the water had fallen and uncovered flat stones in a line, surrounded by brown weeds and shells. I stepped from stone to stone, knowing that each of them lay there to feel the fear of my feet.

Cain knelt before me, he always did that, and I touched his grey hair. Old, he too looked old, in the eyes, and on his forehead which the Sky Man had furrowed with his finger. He said nothing. There couldn’t be any greetings exchanged between us. Cain took my hand and in silence led me to the end of his barren rock. His father was waiting in death for Eve’s greeting and homage.

Besides the tower of stone and clay, there stood only one tree on this small dark island. It was no taller than a man, and Adam before his death had asked Cain to strap both his arms to a branch at the top. Now I was looking at his body, naked as the white bark of the tree, his bound arms stretched out in a gesture welcoming us both, his son and his wife, to the two skies beyond us. Adam’s eyes were closed, his legs drawn together, and with his body thus propped up against the tree, he appeared to be resting after a long journey on foot, too exhausted to lie in the shade, to sleep, to eat.

I lowered my head and, like Cain kneeling before me, I fell on my knees before Adam. I kissed his feet and the rock which they had made sacred by leaving on it the last throb of Adam’s life.

I rose and said to my son:

‘Tell me how Adam died. Tell me all you can remember.’

‘Mother,’ he knelt again and kissed my hand, ‘mother.’ He never called me Eve.

Like my other children, except Amo, he was afraid to join his lips with my name. But now I preferred this warm word to any other sound, and I welcomed the silence which kept the warmth.

‘Tell me about your father.’

‘My father asked me to stay alone with him. I have three wives now, and ten of our children are living with us, two sons and eight daughters. I sent them all by boat to the mainland, and prepared a bedding for my father. But he didn’t want to lie down. He talked to me, he taught me again the things I had once known and lost in growing old; he said, I remember, that the coming of death was like the coming of age, slow at first but sudden at the point of arrival. A day passed and a night. And the next day before noon he spoke about the trees; how he told them of his approaching death and how they promised to take his message to you across the forests.’

‘Why didn’t he grant me more time to come here? It’s a long way from Eve’s lake.’

‘I don’t know, mother. He only said he had to give his eyes the final choice as to whom they wanted to see before closing in death.’

I understood, but didn’t wish that Cain should understand whose face they must have chosen. He spoke again:

‘And my father asked me to lead him to the tree and to bind him to the highest bough. And I did what my father commanded me to do. Then he told me to stand close to him and we faced each other. I saw that we both were as tall as the tree of his death. His lips came forward and he kissed my forehead—here.’ Cain touched the Sky Man’s mark and waited for me to say something. I only nodded in silence.

‘His kiss lingered. And my father said he was drinking strength from the circle made by Our father on Cain’s forehead, and he thanked me for being the bearer of the circle.’

‘Did Adam suffer?’ I asked. ‘Did he feel the heat of sweat? did he complain of thirst!’

‘No, mother, he didn’t complain. He only begged forgiveness from the tree, but I couldn’t follow many of his words because he whispered them in the tree speech. And then my father saw you.’

‘He saw me? When!’

‘When you were crossing a river and the giant water birds, he said, swam on both your sides, ready to assist you, should you have stumbled into a whirlpool. And he smiled at the sight he was watching. It was a happy smile.’

I had no words in my mouth, I felt a strange hunger under those absent words. My son spoke on:

‘And my father looked at death. When you see a look like that, mother, you know it belongs to death.’

‘Did Adam call anyone in a loud voice before he died!’

‘No, he didn’t cry out.’

‘Cain, did he whisper the Sky Man’s name?’

‘No, mother, he didn’t speak to Our father. He whispered your name.’

‘Repeat that whisper to me, Cain.’ His face grew pale and he trembled. Only the sign over his eyes burnt fearlessly, and to this sign I directed my voice:

‘I command you, Cain, to repeat Adam’s last sound.’

‘Eeeve . . .’ his whisper lingered like that kiss of the dying Adam on his brow.

And when the whisper ended, Cain fainted and lay at his father’s feet.

I picked up a cool stone from the ground and put it on his neck. The stone revived him, he rose and walked ahead of me, stooping in the likeness of Adam. The tower cast a shadow, half its afternoon length. Cain looked at it for a while and said as we were entering his home:

‘The shadow of the tree was just that length when he died.’ And my son kissed the double circle on the dark clay inside his tower.

I stayed a few days with Cain until his wives and his children returned to the island. They didn’t know how to speak to me, and preferred to listen and watch. Even the youngest of my granddaughters who played with turtles near the water, ran away from me, afraid of my eyes which she believed could harm her and kill her pets. When Cain carried the child to me in his arms, she kept her eyes covered. And I knew then that the touch of my lips or hands would only make her weep. Perhaps these children lived in dread, hearing the beasts of prey at night. I said to Cain:

‘You must distrust all animals. They were once obedient, they are still playful when young, but their hunger for our flesh grows with their generations.’

‘Animals never come to us, mother, even between the tides, when there is no water, only slime and the stones all the way to the mainland.’

‘Why don’t they come?’

‘Because they smell a killer in me. And I have never destroyed any of them. I obey my father’s commandment.’ He had Adam’s features, he was wrinkled with age and his eyes had already seen death, twice.

‘You are branded with holiness, my son.’ I bowed before him in love and in reverence.

‘I did kill once. Do you kill holiness to bear its mark?’

2

Cain accompanied me through the first forest which was light and slender because of the palm-trees. It was easy to walk and I wanted my firstborn to be my guide and my comfort. His love had no childish tenderness like Amo’s love for me, but he understood Eve better than any of her sons. We didn’t talk much, we didn’t even recall the early days, seventeen children ago, when we were only five in our first human circle: the parents, two sons and a daughter. The first crime broke the first circle.

And not once did Cain speak of Adam’s death on the tree. There was no burial.

Neither I nor my son wished to remember why there couldn’t be any burial for Adam, himself an urn made of clay.

Cain took upon himself some of his father’s duties. Now he was the eldest, a man in the closest image of the man. He would wander, Cain told me, from home to home, wherever the double circle marked the inner walls of Adam’s breed. He would help them to remember what was already half forgotten and what was fading, birth after birth, in the skyless eyes of the new generations.

We were to part on the bank of the same river which I had crossed safely, watched over by the giant water birds and by Adam dying on the tree. This time there were no birds awaiting me. I had to do the crossing on my own. Suddenly, I felt emptiness in the air and above the air, between the two skies: his protection was no longer with us; the life widening in division, which he had held together with his blessing hands, would now split asunder, and we, the people of Adam, would walk the earth amidst the hostile outbursts of growth, amidst the off-shoots of the genesis.

‘I am afraid of the sky which hangs, unsupported by Adam, above our heads.’

On purpose I didn’t mention the Sky Man, but the fiery sign glared at me from Cain’s forehead like the Sky Man’s single eye.

On parting my son knelt and embraced my legs as he had done every morning during our journey, and as every morning before, I laid my hands on his large grey head.

‘My hands will miss the moss softness of your hair.’ I didn’t want him to look up, I knew that he was weeping, the strongest of our breed.

‘Mother,’ Cain said, when I was already standing in the river, ‘what words shall I take from you to your children and the ones born from their seed?’

‘They never come to see Eve, they never come.’ I didn’t mean it to be a reproach.

With the expanse of water ahead of me, I saw it widening into my solitude.

‘My own children think you are a creature from the sky, a woman with the eyes of a giant. They have stupid fears, but they love you even through dread.’

I wanted to believe him, and smiled. The water felt less cold on my ankles. Yes, I would tell him Eve’s thought, a thought fallen from the sky with Eve’s ancient hope, so that he could give it to the others, huddling under their little hopes.

‘Cain, this is my thought for Eve’s children and their generations to come.’ I raised my voice and it sounded well in the dry, windless air. ‘We are being made all the time in the image of what we were and of what we are going to be.’

I repeated Eve’s thought from the sky, and Cain repeated it after me, twice. And he understood it: I could tell by the burning eye over his sunken eyes. Then he departed without turning his head back. This was how his father always departed from me.

The moon counted the measures of my further journey. It grew big three times and three times it lost its roundness, looking now like a goat’s horn, now like the broken skull of a fox. And my blood had stopped flowing, against the moon’s law. I was tired with keeping the old blood, I was tired with being a moonless woman. Only my feet bled, walking.

I could hardly shuffle my legs when I neared the southern end of my lake. A small boat was there to comfort me, a boat scooped by Amo out of black bark. I scraped the slime and filled a crack with sticky stalks, then I lay in the boat exhausted, my arms drooping into the water. Later I used them to paddle, and arrived home towards the evening.

It was impossible at first to step onto the shore. The ground was torn and slashed with their tusks and snouts; dung, bones and heaps of broken twigs lay scattered along the lake and up over my path. As I was wading through the animal dirt, I heard their snorting, grunting and squealing. Like locusts they covered my land, like locusts they were devouring the food of my land. On four legs, with hideous tails behind, on four props for their bulging bellies, four busy hooves in their own mire.

And I couldn’t enter my house. The big stones in the doorway were stinking with animal urine, the passage between them was befouled, ankle-deep, with excrements, the strong odour of beasts clung to the clay walls; wisps of moulting fur, feathers and bitten-off claws turned my three beddings into dishevelled lairs.

Were the beasts hiding from my anger, or watching me from the dark corners?

Perhaps they were already on the run. Had I heard the last of their noises? What could I do now? Only clean a small part of the house and sleep in it, expecting strength to return after a long night.

I worked for a whole day removing the dirt, washing the kitchen and the entrance stones; the next day I repaired Amo’s rain wall, under which the beavers and foxes had dug holes; I toiled for six days more, among the wounded trees and uprooted plants. My strength had returned, but another effort like this would spend it forever. Through my heavy work and the dread of further hardships I recognized my old age. How could I go on, resisting their intrusion, cleansing my land of their filth if my own ages were against my blood? They told Eve’s body to disobey Eve.

With their quick snouts the animals must have smelt my weakness, as they could smell a rotting carcass from a distance. But however hard they tried, they would never sniff out Eve’s thoughts. I had prepared a few of my thoughts to catch the beasts unawares. All round the centre of my homestead I placed snares and traps, using the hunting tricks of Amo and my own guile.

Between the traps I lit night fires so that no animal could slip through the circle.

During the first night after setting up my sly defences I heard much howling and screaming, but I wanted to see their exhausted ferocity in the light of day. Their contorted limbs, broken tails, smears of blood and torn-off flesh satisfied my revenge. Still, I had to think beyond this satisfaction. I would leave them, each in its pit of pain, to howl and writhe, to scorch in the sun, so that their packs could hear the cries and then see, if they dared to come, Eve’s punishment.

Before the moon changed, I got used to my imprisoned beasts, to their slow dying and their teeth bared in the moment of stillness. So far I had never ensnared a monkey.

But after the full moon I saw one, beating the pole over the trap with both its paws.

Instead of widening the top, the monkey loosened the lower perch, slipped and screamed on grabbing a cluster of thorns. Then it kept quiet, out of fear of dropping deeper, or it had lost much blood. I left the beast as it was, but in the morning went to observe my victim.

The monkey had already managed to disentangle itself from the bramble of thorns, its head was visible above the ground, a large head narrow at the top. What were the eyes like? Could I surprise the beast by sneaking from behind so as to catch his eyes?

It heard movements at once, turned its whole body and stared straight at me. Now it was I who felt drawn to his eyes, I who wanted to look into them. To test the monkey’s endurance I crouched and held his stare in mine. Then I shuddered. There was a human intelligence in front of me, not fully human perhaps, but close enough to make further pretence worthless.

I had trapped a young treeman, but very different from the big ape who had first named himself in the likeness of man; he could face Eve because he must have been born by one of her daughters. No, not Irda’s tree man, he would have been younger, and I would have guessed without fail that he was hers. Strange how this revelation altered my next thought. I should help this creature to free himself, I was ready to hold my hand out when I recalled the earlier feeling which didn’t concern the treeman at all, but my daughter. Why then this sudden pity, I thought, could I really pity a creature so remindful of the ugliest shame I knew!

The treeman, as if sensing my hesitation, lifted himself through the painful obstacles in the snare, didn’t utter a cry, and to my admiration clambered out, unhelped.

Again he looked at me, this time almost with a laughing grimace and hobbled to a trap, in which a lynx cub had died during the night. With his clever paws he undid the twisted noose, removed the sticks from under the perch, the dead animal fell in, and the treeman shoved leaves over it. His movements were precise, no doubt to impress me further, and I was impressed.

After the young treeman had stayed a few days, eating, sleeping and curing his wounds, I learnt much about his habits and would do nothing to frighten him away. I was still curious and I almost wished he would think something up to prove how spiteful ape-men could become, if you let them go free. He soon showed his manner of thinking. By night he hobbled about, doing this and that to the clay, then he flattened it to get a smooth surface, and started to draw short lines and pierce dots with a flint. I saw he wanted me to watch, because he kept turning his head towards the entrance stones.

First the treeman drew a tree, then another, then a circle with three dots inside; after the circle came animal hooves and tails, then more trees and more dots. Once he was sure that I observed his movements, he began adding things between and above the signs.

He nodded when I recognized a treeman and a woman, he nodded again when I said both words. The young treeman was talking to me through lines and circles on the clay.

Whenever I gave the right word at once, he was pleased and sat up on his stump of a tail, admiring the clay surface. This small tail seemed to serve him well, it was as active as a snout, yet it could never be a killing weapon. Now he rested on his rear stump, a funny sight for a monkey, a sad stranger for Eve, and I liked the treeman for having a mere stump of a tail.

His leg got better, and he stopped hobbling around his patch of clay speech. One afternoon he drew me a walking sign, four feet and a line of trees. He was asking me to visit the treeland. From his gestures and nods I could guess no threat or condition; on the contrary, the ape-man made me understand this was an almost humble plea. And the visit shouldn’t be postponed: he expressed the urgency by adding a few more drawings of feet, all close to one another, as if rushing on.

I thought Eve’s lakeland was much farther away from the land of the tree-apes. It took us merely a day and part of a night to reach the enclosure which the big chieftain had chosen to be the seat of his dominion. There he was buried, like a man, under a heavy stone, so that no jackal or buzzard could attack his grave. This I learnt from a very clever sign which the young treeman had moulded for me, using clay, sticks and a little stone. It was during our second rest, and I told him too, how their ruler had died from Adam’s unspoken thought. The treeman nodded often, he understood my words or perhaps knew the story already.

We arrived in the dark. I was led into a twig-plaited bower, smelling of mint leaves and juniper; there I found food and drink prepared for a human creature, soon a small fire was lit outside by some invisible hands. No one disturbed me, I had time to think and to sleep. My first thoughts, however, didn’t go to Irda alone; I was trying to imagine them all, half-human apes, quarter-human apes and daughters of man, there in those tall trees, ignorant of my presence in their midst, or, maybe, ordered to wait patiently until the light of day.

On awaking I saw fresh food, a new fire, and a tree man very much like the one who had fallen into my trap, their eyes had the same glow of intelligence and understood my signs. Instead of using the other’s clay speech, this treeman could utter a few human words. The most important of them were two names, his and Irda’s. He called himself Na-ar and was married to Irda.

Na-ar treated me with great respect, but no fear showed in his eyes. Like his brother he could stare at me without harming his beautiful human eyes. I asked him many questions, some of which he didn’t seem willing to answer, although at first I believed he had missed the sense of some words. No, he understood me perfectly. How many children had they, he and Irda, and Na-ar showed with his dark sinewy fingers: thirteen.

Impossible, I said, for I thought immediately of the twenty births by which I counted my ages.

This he found difficult to explain in words because he didn’t know many and the clay speech probably lacked signs for such ideas. Finally, I gathered from the animal noises he also tried on me that the mating between the tree-apes and my daughters quickened the birth of their offspring, and so they were many. They had to multiply and they did multiply to ensure their dominion over the trees.

Irda’s husband had a word and a gesture to inform me of her illness. ‘Bad,’ he said and quickly squeezed his hairy temples. And then he brought to me Amo’s daughter, my last child, and some of her offspring. No questions were needed now, no speech whatsoever, whether laid on the tongue or on the clay. Irda stood empty of Irda.

She didn’t recognize me. And I saw before me an aged woman clothed in monkey skins, her grey hair tangled into the shape of a beehive, her arms and legs thin and scratched all over. Her husband and the husband’s clever brother explained what was unnecessary to explain: that she kept falling off the trees, because her illness was bad, bad in the head, there-and again they touched their own hairy temples. Cure Irda with your fingers, they both pointed to my trembling hands, cure her.

Then her children tugged at my tresses, my girdle, my bracelets. And they squealed and snorted, and shrieked with human sounds, the idiots of my new generation.

I stood in their midst, invoking from within my deepest silence the power that was once named Eve.

Yes, I did try to cure my crazy daughter. I placed the burning tip of my finger in the middle of her forehead, I pressed it hard, I mumbled something to the demons howling inside her thoughts behind her brilliant eyes, and I hoped, how I hoped then, that I would brand her with the fire of sanity, and that the mark would remain there, with the Sky Man’s will or against his will.

Since Irda’s sickness had already triumphed in her offspring, those human apes with invisible tails, I couldn’t burn it out at the roots. She didn’t want to return with me.

Like her mother, Irda trusted the trees; like Eve she loved them.

3

Now my great age and my great weakness were known to all the creatures of the earth. How could I be called the mother of the earth if I had failed to cure my own daughter? The treemen spread the news. I had no power in me, no protection from my husband, and the Sky Man was against me, as before. So the animals which he had put between Eve and her husband were now invading my land from every lair in the forests around the big lake.

The traps, my sly traps, could stop one attack at a time, but they couldn’t intimidate thousands of arrogant beasts. Like insects during a drought they rushed on, devouring all they found on their way, blind to fear and indifferent to pain.

The centre of my homestead, surrounded by snares and night fires, was becoming smaller as I retreated under their renewed onslaughts. In the end I hid in my ancient home, its entrance barred with two stones. I watched the animals, greedy tigers and water-pigs, giant eels and spiked giraffes, elephants and timid stags, wolves, horses and cows, I saw their herds and packs crowding in, trampling the ground which was mine, pushing against the rain walls, destroying Amo’s ditches and Eve’s paths, erasing the sacred memory of Adam’s steps.

No child of mine, none of my breed came to my rescue. I was the widow of the earth, and the earth belonged to the beasts. Even the tree-apes who tried to cheat men out of their inheritance, even they preferred to side with the multitudinous armies on four legs. The treemen still had their treetops, but the trunks below were knocked and brushed by the lowing herds on the move.

I wanted to die facing the clear water. I wanted to be close to my lake. With all the strength I had I pushed the stones aside. Into the animal throng I walked, made my way slowly, almost unnoticed by their stupid greedy eyes. No, it mattered little whether I blinded a few of them, or not; they wouldn’t even fall to the ground, so tightly they were squeezed in this enclosure.

Was I descending along my ancient path? There were no paths, no clusters of grass, no bushes, nothing but mud, dust and their dung smearing Eve’s feet. When I reached the lake, bruised by their sniffing snouts and stinking of their bristle, I fell on my knees and greeted the fragrant rushes with my mouth wide open, breathing their green air.

They were my friends, the lake was their mother. I could trust the water and all that grew from the water.

With my lips touching the lips of the lake I cried into the water, and it rippled my cry across its flat surface to the other side, invisible under the haze of the heat.

‘Eve, queen of the earth, summons you, ancient creatures, to come to Eve’s aid.’

Echoes cried with me as I chanted my lament. ‘I am old, I am tired, my children have abandoned me to the abuse of low animals, and I have had to abandon my home.’

Echoes answered echoes, but I heard no creature calling me back. So I summoned them by their names, taking upon me Adam’s authority. I called the giant eels and they didn’t leave the herds of the lower beasts; I summoned the spiked giraffes and none of them left the stagnant stampede, I even uttered the names of the water-pigs which I despised, and they, too, remained with the others. Oh, water, I whispered, take me now, spare me this humiliation. The water kept its covenant with the sky and reflected silence.

I must have fallen asleep.

When I woke up, once more on the surface of the earth which was no longer mine, I knew they had come, two ancient allies, and they took their posts at either side of my lake. Their green jewels shone across the reeds and the sedge from their thick crinkled fins to my creased face, whose ugly image I could see wobbling on the water.

The dragons, the last breathing witnesses of our beginning, had listened to Eve and now they were to guard Eve the old woman, the moonless woman, barren as the ancient life under their shimmering scales.

Now, I found my patch of ground again, untouched by animal hooves, my circle within the lost circle. Here I wished to remain, a species in itself, abandoned by the rest of his creation. I was safe as long as the dragons had jewels on their fins and breathed in the ancient fire from between the skies. Yes, they had to drink. They drank the waters of my lake. One day, how many hundreds of years from now, Eve’s lake would be dry, swallowed in gigantean gulps by the dragons, Eve’s two faithful allies.

The sly old woman had learnt much about animal traps, but the beasts lost their pluck; they would not risk a visit to the dragon lake. Birds flew over my little queendom, soft bundles of feathers migrating from warmth to warmth. I caught one with a hooked beak, and its Wings, yellow and violet, flapped through a dark passage in my memory.

Eve’s thoughts were touched by colours, violet first, then beak-red and yellow, and the thoughts tried a grimace of a smile.

‘I’ll teach you Eve’s speech,’ I said to my prisoner in a loose basket with a hole for the beak. The parrot turned and blinked her eye. Yes, she was a good listener. I told her stories. Of my genesis and Adam’s, of Amo my son-husband and Irda who went to live among the treemen. After each story I told the parrot to repeat my name again and again, so that I could hear it from her beak when the lake was still and the lowing herds asleep on the land they had taken from me. The parrot was a good learner and I didn’t mind her drowsy screech. Like my friends the dragons, I protected my slow deathless agony with frequent sleep. When my dreams were kind, they showed the earth without animals, inhabited by dragons made of ore, and hooped all round with metal.

Then a violent autumn wind sent me the present of a light acorn. I fondly thought it had come from the oak which was my last birth tree, but, of course, no growing thing could have survived the stampede of the animals. I planted the acorn and the rains lent me much juicy water in the autumn and in the spring.

After several seasons I had a child oak of my own, obedient as small children often are. So I taught the obedient oak to stride on its roots in the likeness of those ancient trees which had once protected Eve in her sleep. And the oak grew bigger and walked better in rustling circles around me, the old witch by the dragon lake. Some curious animals risked their muzzles and bulging eyes to stand nearer to such a monstrous ungodly sight. They wagged their tails, they roared or mooed in amazement, and then trotted back to spread tales in their mute wordless mumbling. No doubt the grandchildren of my grand-daughters heard these rumours and no doubt they prayed to their carved idols for my death’s first and final coming. Wasn’t Eve promised death by the big sky idol himself. Oh, yes, they knew that, such things always came down, from sacred awe to fearful piety. Good mighty Sky Man remove the witch Eve from the surface of the earth.

But the good Sky Man never hurried his big mighty ears to listen downwards.

I had, however, a listening bird, the parrot with a patient beak. And now that my tiredness seemed to age each of my senses separately, I couldn’t hear well the sound of my name, screeched from inside the red beak.

‘Repeat my name, listening bird. Lull me to sleep with my sounds. Say Eve, screech Eeeve, please, bird, I am so very old!’

The parrot gaped at me, sideways. I tempted her: ‘I will tell you again about the great King Treeman and your great ancestor, the most clever parrot of them all.’

The screeching began, but it shaped no word. I encouraged the bird, offered her food, and waited all through the night for that one soothing sound. When it came at last, it scratched the icy air up and down before hardening into speech, each word a tap on my forehead.

‘Sstupid trapper, look! you’ve trapped your deathth.’

I looked up. From whose beak was the voice coming? I tried to hold the parrot’s screech within my closing hand. Why not ask the silence overhead, between the two skies?

‘Our father, have you—?’ and I didn’t know what to ask him.

Portugal, 1964

Table of Contents

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

Book One

Book Two

Book Three