THE ROAR OF THE BLOOD
An aeroplane flew along the Strand at a height of one thousand feet. When it reached Trafalgar Square people began jumping from it. Bystanders found it difficult, later, to describe the sound they made as they fell, but many found great significance in the fact that some had actually bounced on hitting the ground. This detail was repeated many times, with relish or revulsion or awe, to friends, police, mediamen.
To Frank, however, sitting on a damp bench in the Square, hands thrust deep in pockets, lazily pondering spectacular methods of exterminating the grimy pigeons dipping and bowing at his feet, the most significant point concerning this unexpected event was that it had no style. Something like fifty bodies lay about the Square, smashed and broken, crumpled and bloody. Some had hit buildings on the way down and rags of flesh were daubed along parapets and balconies; some, amazingly, were not dead, and were now moaning and crying. It was . . . messy. Personally, Frank would have tried for something memorable, like impaling himself on the upraised arm of Nelson, atop his column; but then, of course, he would never have involved himself in such a vulgar mass stunt, in which there could be no individual recognition.
He heard the sound of the aeroplane again and looked up. It had turned sharply, somewhere above Knightsbridge, and was now heading back for the Square. More people jumped, and the scene was repeated. No point, muttered Frank; once achieves the effect. He looked hopefully up at Nelson’s arm. Nothing.
The aeroplane made two more passes, on the last of which the falling bodies were joined by a snowstorm of white leaflets. Frank picked one up.
It was headed, church of universal despair.
Brothers and Sisters! Look around you! Do you like what you see? No? Then why do you put up with it? What do you think God feels when he sees you wallowing like pigs in the mess you have made for yourselves? Isn’t it obvious? He thinks, How can they Love Me when they have turned the world I made into a pigsty and wallow in it like pigs? How can they turn their eyes up to Me when they are so busy rooting in the slime they have created? And God is right, Brothers and Sisters, you know He is! You must prove to God that you Love Him, you must show Him that you have nothing but contempt for the world you have created. And how is that done? Brothers and Sisters! It is done by rejecting the pigsty you have made, by treating it with the utter contempt which is all it deserves! You know, Brothers and Sisters, in your heart of hearts, that the only sane response to the pigsty we have made for ourselves, is to leave it! To give ourselves to God in pure faith, to prove to Him by our rejection—
Frank crumpled the leaflet and threw it to the ground. It made him sick when people joined themselves together like this, so that they were indistinguishable, one from the other. What was the point of them all killing themselves together like that, for some stupid cause? They might as well have thrown a couple of hundredweight of guts from an abattoir out of that aeroplane.
Police sirens were approaching from all directions, and the Square was rapidly filling up with people, running from one smashed body to another. Some were collecting souvenir smears of blood on handkerchiefs, some were rapidly clicking cameras, some stood frozen in some powerful emotion, staring at the scene. The pigeons were hovering in a great cloud, but some were landing now, pecking daintily at the pools of blood.
Frank found the scene pathetic. The way people were able to be so completely, so shamelessly . . . themselves . . . the way they were able to ignore what others might think of them and just behave exactly as they felt—fighting and shoving to catch a glimpse, stupid wet mouths open, hands anxiously clutching and pushing. After all, the scene was no more bloody than the gang fight in Hyde Park last month between the Punks and the Lords —when the cleavers and hatchets had stopped swinging, the Park had looked like a butcher’s shop. And of course, when the Mob had an outing, the city streets were piled high with torn corpses. And yet they behaved like this just for some pointless religious stunt.
Thinking of the Mob, he realised that there was every chance a nucleus would form here shortly—people were already coalescing into groups and several fights had started—and he had no desire to be locked in when the riot barriers slid into place. He walked quickly away towards Lower Regent Street, as the Square began to fill up with police lorries and resound to the rise and fall of sirens and loudspeaker announcements.
These public scenes were something he tried to remain aloof from, and he had seen plenty of them in the four days he had been wandering backwards and forwards across the city. People would be moving along quite normally and quietly, then something would happen, and it would be as if, suddenly, strange animals with flashing eyes and teeth jumped out of their bodies and turned their faces into savage masks. Not that Frank minded the savagery—it was usually so real that it could only be honest —no, it was the inconsistency that upset him, the way people could change completely from one second to the next and not even be ashamed or embarrassed that the flimsy cardboard of their facades had been torn away for everyone to see inside. He liked people to be one thing or the other, but he could not bear it when they were both. He, personally, never let his mask slip. He was always himself.
He paused at an Instapape slot, inserted a coin, and carefully folded the flimsy yellow sheet as it emerged.
c.u.d.’s most spectacular stunt yet
The Church of Universal Despair today chartered a Hercules airfreighter which was used in a mass-suicide demonstration by the Church’s disciples over central London. Two hundred men and women jumped from the aircraft over Trafalgar Square in what was described as an evangelical gesture. The Church, which considers suicide the only acceptable response to the modern world—
He stuffed the pape in his pocket. Evangelical gesture! No one would ever know the names of any of those two hundred, they would forever be as anonymous as the remnants of their bodies, probably even now being sucked up by the police waste-vacuums for eventual consignment to the Ilford rubbish-tip. Stupid! Dying for nothing.
He had just passed the end of the Haymarket when the rush-hour warning lights came on and the klaxons began to rise and fall. The iron gates of the office buildings swung open all at once, and almost in the same instant, riot-barriers began to slowly creak and grate out of their housings and across the streets which led to Trafalgar Square. The first office-workers to come tumbling blindly out of their buildings saw this and sprinted madly for the slowly narrowing gap, briefcases bouncing on their wrist-chains. Some made it and continued running across the Square to Charing Cross Station, skirting the fast-growing Mob on the left. The others were too late and after kicking the barriers in frustration, began the long roundabout walk which would eventually bring them to the Station. The street was full now, of pushing, stumbling, elbowing people, all completely single-minded, and as Frank had been unable to get into a Shelter before the rush began, he was forced to shuffle along with them. This was a much better area of the city than the one in which the Department of Unemployment, where he worked, was situated. These people were probably going home to single-unit houses out in the country: three, or perhaps even four rooms, tended day-long by neat wives, fingers always on the button of the Dust-maid, or the Airkleen, or the Dazzlewash. They did not look at Frank, they did not look at each other, they did not raise their heads at the steadily growing howl of riot behind them. They were secure. They knew where they were going.
Frank realised that he had been carried well past Lower Regent Street, and had to push and shove vigorously against the unyielding, uncaring wall of bodies around him before he could join a cross-flow going up to Piccadilly. Once out of the main stream, the crowd thinned a little and he was able to make a small space to walk in untouched. The flow took him to just short of Piccadilly Circus before it lost its identity in the strolling crowd. A boy with piled-up blond hair smiled at him. A woman wearing only shorts and high-heeled shoes looked at him and lifted her breasts in the palms of her hands. A man beckoned at the doorway of a club offering the torture of live animals on stage “in the half-round.” He ignored them, only sank deeper down into himself.
There had been women in his life, he’d known women. He wasn’t a boy to be excited because a whore flaunted herself at him in the street. No, sex exerted no power over him. He thought of Julia. He had never made love to Julia, never even touched her . . . anywhere. He had given her no reason to think him base, like other men. He had struggled to hold her above the filth, the way he had excluded those he loved from his adolescent masturbation fantasies. And she had left him, of course. Yes, she had left him.
He turned into Shaftesbury Avenue and walked past the Thrill Palace. A scaffold projected from its roof with a body dangling from the rope, man hanged on stage every night! screamed the posters. A small knot of tourists was already forming a queue to book for the evening performance. A busker, stripped to the waist, and obviously drunk, was trying to attract their attention. A young man accepted his challenge to make him sick by punching him in the stomach, and after handing over his five pounds, rolled up his sleeves. The punch was short and vicious and the fist almost disappeared in rolls of flesh. The busker staggered backward, fell, but picked himself up, pale-faced and bent double, to prove that the five pounds was his. Frank moved on.
Next to the Thrill Palace was a sex-shop. He dawdled at the window, looking at the finger-breakers, branding-irons, eye-gouges. Cellophane-wrapped magazines with titles like The Executioner, The Torturer, The Pain-Object, full-size iron maiden, said a poster, ask inside.
He walked on slowly. In a street off the main road he found a small café and had a coffee, pretending absorption in his pape while he drank it. In fact, he was thinking of bodies falling from the sky, spinning and twisting, the expressions on their faces caught by telephoto lenses at the beginning of the descent and held through the long fall in detail, faces distorted in the rush of air, limbs out of control, eyes fixed on the earth turning below, jerking upward with sickening speed, down and down and down until they rammed into the earth like bullets. He felt his teeth being smashed through his lips, his skull crushing into pulp, his spine telescoping, his legs splintering, and clutched the pape convulsively.
A detail which had not been prominent appeared before him vividly: falling beside each body, slamming and banging in the slipstream, had been a briefcase, held in place by a wrist-chain. . . .
Outside, he wandered back the way he had come, and stopped when he reached the Thrill Palace. The actors’ queue was already forming at the top of the narrow alley at the side of the theatre. The busker had changed his act. He was now making shallow cuts on his body with a razor blade. A crowd of grinning Japanese tourists were dropping five-pound notes in his hand and pointing out the spots where they wanted the cuts to be made. Frank watched absentmindedly for a moment or two, and then, as if suddenly remembering an urgent appointment, broke away and walked up the alley at the side of the Thrill Palace, pushing his way through the group around the vacancies board.
wanted:
actress: rough handling and intercourse with animals
actor: severance of right hand
actor: crucifixion (hang for minimum one hour)
actor: severe beating
actor: severe beating with broken limbs
actor: homosexual acts with severe beating
There were over thirty entries on the list. At the bottom, in large capitals, was the entry:
ACTOR: STAR PART: DEATH BY HANGING
He joined the queue, looking disdainfully at those beside him. In front of him, a hunchback with sharp delicate features ran his fingers nervously up and down the strap of the tape recorder slung from his shoulder. A fat man wearing a tentlike white djellaba continually licked his caricature cupid-lips. An intelligent-looking woman wearing a fur coat smoked cigarette after cigarette, sucking smoke deep into her lungs, closing her eyes often.
“Hat-trick tonight if I’m lucky.”
He looked round. A little man behind him gave an apologetic smile. His face was covered with bruises and his bottom lip bore a scab from a recent cut, “Hat-trick tonight if I’m lucky,” he repeated. “Got a severe beating part last night at the Theatre of Terror, a prolonged interrogation with slapping at the Roxy Squealdrome matinee this afternoon, and this’ll be my hat-trick if they take me on tonight.”
He turned away and heard the little man say, half-defensively, but almost without interest, “Fifty pounds so far . . . seventy-five if I get it tonight. . . .” His voice took on feeling again: “Mmmm, wouldn’t mind if he administered the beating . . .”
Frank was thinking about the Cross. Hanging by nails through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet in front of an avid audience. Moaning occasionally, hearing answering moans from out beyond the footlights; gasps from the spectators as he moved his body sensually in a vain attempt to find a less painful position. He relaxed his left leg, unconsciously adopting the slouch he remembered from mediaeval paintings of Christ on the Cross. The Cross. Rough pine, splinters, wood-smell . . .
Up ahead at the end of the alley the stage door opened and a man wearing denim emerged. A pair of sunglasses was pushed up on his forehead. Accompanying him was an earnest young girl with a harelip, carrying a clipboard. The man in denim nodded at her.
“Actress—rough handling and intercourse with animals,” she called out.
There was a short silence, then the woman with the fur coat stepped forward, looking defiantly ahead, her cigarette held carelessly between two fingers of an extravagantly dramatic right hand. The denim-clad man glanced at her and said, “Hired.”
His assistant ticked her list and called out, “Actor—severe beating.” Several men stepped forward, including the hopeful bruised one. The director studied them and chose a short, stocky man with an impassive face. Frank watched the bruised man as others were chosen for “severe beating—broken limbs” and “homosexual acts—severe beating,” and saw his pulpy face fall into dejection. He went up to the director, pulled his sleeve, and said urgently, “Listen, I can do a novelty torture, always goes down well, got my own gear, really unusual . . .” but he was ignored.
“Actor—severance of right hand,” called out the harelipped assistant. The bruised man hesitated, then stepped forward. No one joined him. The director looked at him for a long time. Then he yawned and said, “Hired.” The little man sagged. It was not clear whether he was weak with happiness or with shock.
“Crucifixion,” called the girl, “minimum one hour.”
Frank stepped forward, feeling a cut above these primitive masochists. Twenty others stepped forward with him.
He hid his surprise, but his pride suffered. He had thought he would be the only one, the only one with enough subtlety to handle the exquisite pain of crucifixion.
The director studied the applicants for some time, his gaze moving impassively over Frank’s expression of studied boredom. He chose a tall emaciated man with straggly hair. Frank felt humiliated that he had put himself up for hire and been refused. An evening’s martyrdom was something he would have liked . . . someone ... to feel responsible for.
But he did not leave, stayed instead to listen to the calls for subjects for flogging, branding, partial flaying. He felt a mounting excitement as the end of the list was neared.
“Star part,” called the girl, “death by hanging.”
There was complete silence in the alley. Traffic-noise drifted in from Shaftesbury Avenue. A pigeon coorooed from its perch on the wall above them. The girl cleared her throat.
“Star part—death by hanging.”
Frank stepped forward.
“Hired,” said the director.
* * * *
At a small booth just inside the stage door the actors and actresses were registered and made to sign formal contracts for the temporary use of their bodies. Numbers appropriate to their parts in the show were stamped on the backs of their hands in violet ink. The old man in the booth stamped Frank’s hand much harder than was necessary and refused to look at him. Frank was not asked to sign.
In the theatre basement they sat on long benches in the communal dressing room. Moisture dripped down the brown-painted walls. A conical enamel lamp shade swayed gently in the breeze from a street-level ventilator. Some were in a state of barely-suppressed excitement, others apparently impassive. They did not look at each other.
Frank felt euphoric. He was not thinking about the reasons he was here, but he could feel excitement building in his chest. At this time he would normally have been at home, sitting up in bed watching television, steadily smoking ready-rolled joints. He put the palms of his hands together and clasped them between his knees, saw that his legs were shaking, began to hum tunelessly to himself.
A fat man entered the dressing room. He was wearing white trousers and a white t-shirt with sweat stains at the armpits.
“Will you please all go along the corridor to the wardrobe room at the end,” he said. “Those of you who need costumes will be fitted and those of you who have lines to say will be given crib-sheets and any necessary instruction. Refreshments are available at the kiosk near the stage door, but do please be back here thirty minutes before showtime.”
They began to shuffle out. As Frank passed him, the fat man gently grasped his elbow and said, “Please step into my office, will you?”
Frank followed him through dingy corridors, fascinated by the multidirectional movements of his fleshy body. They entered a large, comfortably furnished room. Thick rugs covered the parquet floor; there were potted plants in a large free-standing box. On the wall were objects Frank did not recognise.
“Ah, yes,” said the fat man, “those are relics from a less literal age than ours. The small plastic sacs are blood capsules—a small explosive charge discharged their contents when a blank cartridge was fired. The knife above them is spring-loaded—it was used to stab without harming the actor. In the box are plastic scars and wounds, madman’s foam made from egg-white, tears of water in plastic vials fitted with easy eye-applicators. There was a certain amount of artifice in pain in those days.” He looked directly at Frank. “The leather harness to your left was used to simulate hanging,” he said, waiting for his response with slightly amused curiosity. When there was none, he continued: “The actor would strap it on beneath his clothing and the noose was unobtrusively fixed to that small hook at the back there. Swing for days in that thing without coming to any harm.”
Frank heard someone walk rapidly along the corridor past the room, saying, “—and now the bloody Spanish Mare’s got a broken leg...”
“Sit down,” said the fat man. He gestured to a chair upholstered in green velvet. Frank sat down and crossed his legs, rested his elbows on the arms of the chair and clasped his hands over his stomach. He was starting to feel more himself. Here was someone he could react to, someone to whom he could justify his actions, or choose to leave ignorant. Amused condescension appealed to him at that moment, and so he raised his left eyebrow and allowed a faint smile to ever so faintly twist the lines of his mouth.
“Never been in this line of work before, have you?” said the fat man. He smiled momentarily. “Won’t get a chance to be in it again, that’s for certain. Still . . . you’ll have your . . . moment of glory . . .”
Frank was trying to think of something to say that would instantly convince the fat man that the choice of death before an audience was an existential decision meaningful only to him, which automatically excluded puny sarcasm on the part of others, but nothing came. He cranked his smile up a centimeter or so and attempted to look inscrutable.
“Sure you wouldn’t like to tell me about your, er, reasons? Might as well not indulge in games at this late stage ... if you want to tell, get it off your chest . . . you won’t get a chance later . . . no one’ll be interested. . . .”
Reasons? Frank smiled to himself. The fat man was just like the commuters who came to see his shows: laughably sure of himself, never realising just how small was the circle his power illuminated. His patronizing attitude was not insulting. Only amusing. How could he ever understand, anyway, that the “reasons” were not apparent even to Frank, that his act was like that of the quiz contestant who presses the buzzer as soon as the question is finished, hoping that the answer will occur to him before the cameras close in on his face? Unless . . . this was not an unusual attitude. Perhaps it was more common than any other . . , his stomach went cold as he felt his uniqueness threatened. He realized that he had not spoken for six days. He decided that it would be bad luck to break the silence now. He was funny like that.
“Oh, well,” said the fat man, putting his hand to his mouth to cover a yawn, “please yourself. Not important. Probably a woman. Or anything else.”
He became quite suddenly businesslike and, going over to a large mahogany desk, began rummaging in its drawers while continuing to talk.
“Payment will be made if you wish it. The rate is a hundred pounds and the money will be paid to a nominee of your choice when your act is completed. You will sign this contract ninety minutes before your appearance and will from that moment be legally bound to fulfill your obligation. In order to ensure that you do not break your contract once signed, you will be guarded, and should you show unwillingness to participate in our spectacle, the guards will forcibly ensure your appearance on stage. It’s of no importance, really; many audiences prefer a little, er, coercion—but some actors have a great regard for such things as dignity and pride. . . . Oh, yes, and I’m obliged to tell you that individual funeral requests cannot be met—the Greater London Council insists that all waste biological material from the shows be reserved for the recycling vats.” He smiled and gently laid the contract on Frank’s knee. “You are due to sign in two minutes. Please use my pen.”
Frank had not been impressed by the obviously prepared speech. He was familiar with the use of sadism from a position of power, was in fact quite adept at the practice himself, and he saw the cold description of impersonal death as a weapon hurled at him by the fat man in a battle of personalities, rather than as a factual account of his own impending demise. He signed, and, unwilling to perform for nothing, entered Julia’s name and address in the nominee box.
The fat man took the contract and the pen from him. “Oh, in case you’re wondering,” he said, with the air of someone imparting interesting but not essential information, “about the significance of the ninety minutes? . . . er, that is the minimum time in which we could find another actor for your part.. . less time than that would not make the task impossible, but it would certainly be more difficult,” He smiled. “You see . . . men like you are very rare . . . very rare indeed . . . after all, we only use one a night. Admittedly, that is every night of the week, and the show has been running for thirteen months . . . but what is that compared to...say, the population of India? ... a drop, a mere drop in the ocean ...”
He smiled.
* * * *
Frank was fitted with white stockings, black breeches that buckled at the knee, and a loose-fitting white shirt with frills on the chest. Black shoes with large silver buckles completed the outfit. It was the costume of his fantasies, it was what he had seen himself wearing on the nights when he had stood opposite the Thrill Palace, hands in pockets, staring at the posters and the crowds and the gibbet and noose and dummy body swinging high above the street. It was as if he were being clothed in his dreams. And the costume helped him to approximate his dream-self, for his back stiffened, his shoulders straightened and his determination not to soil himself with speech increased.
As he entered the big dressing room, the raucous opening music of the show blared out. Even filtered by distance it was strident and harsh. The hunchback jerked his head up at the sound. Then he returned, after a brief, embarrassed glance at Frank, to the rapid speech he was making into the microphone of his tape recorder.
An attendant followed Frank to his seat. He adjusted his truncheon in its leather holster and said, “You taking a fee, mate?”
Frank meant to ignore him, but nodded when he saw the small cold eyes.
“Assigned it?”
Frank nodded again. The attendant stared at him a moment, twisting the thong at the top of his truncheon between his fingers, then he grunted and turned to face the room.
“Numbers one to twelve, stir yourselves, numbers one to twelve.” He grinned as eight men and four women stood up and looked at him nervously.
“Your big moment has come,” he said, “this way, if you please . . . ladies and gentlemen . . .”
He led them out. At the door he said something to the second attendant, who looked over at Frank and shrugged.
Frank had just realized that he had nodded only twice in answer to the guard’s questions. Two was not a complete number. He nodded once more to make three. Then he nodded in two more sets of three just to make sure. Three threes was unbeatable.
“Opening’s a demonstration mass-beating number, I believe.”
Frank looked up and saw the little man with the bruised face.
“They always get the run-of-the-mill stuff out of the way first.” He smiled at Frank and tried to look into his eyes. “You and me, now—we’re novelties—we’re what the public comes to see. We’re something special.”
Frank stared straight ahead, expressionless.
“Be about an hour before I’m on,” said the little man. “Got a tableau part all to myself, costume too . . .” He indicated the badly-fitting cloth leggings he was wearing and the shapeless peasant’s jerkin with its big front pocket. “Even got a line ... I have to say, ‘Nay, Lord, I am no thief.’ “ He beamed. “Yes, that’s it: ‘Nay, Lord, I am no thief.’ “ He looked down. “But they don’t believe me, of course, and I, er, I get punished.”
Frank did not speak or move. The little man coughed. “Of course, the only reason I do this is for the money,” he said, “wouldn’t do it otherwise.” He coughed again. “I suppose you’ve, er, nominated someone? . . . for your fee, I mean? . . .”
Frank turned slowly and stared at him. The little man blushed bright red and hurried on: “Yes, of course you have, of course . . . don’t worry, I’ll pass it around, you won’t be bothered.”
Frank turned away, enjoying the control he was exercising.
The little man looked doleful. “Be nearly an hour before I’m on...” he said. He moved slowly away, massaging his right wrist with his left hand.
What would Julia do when she received the check for a hundred pounds? Without allowing himself to indulge in the humiliation of hope, he decided that the fee would be sent with a brochure for Punishment Follies and an offer for cut-rate seats. His name would be prominent on the note attached to the check. There would be no doubt in her mind as to what he had done. How would she feel then?
His fantasy faded into darkness. So what? What did her feelings matter? He knew now that she was not important. Four days ago, when he had risen from his desk in the middle of Monday morning, cleared his papers neatly away, put on his coat and picked up his briefcase; four days ago, when he had ignored the puzzled questions of his colleagues, walked calmly out of the room, held the door open politely for Mr. Whittaker as he left; four days ago, when he had quietly waited for the doorkeeper to draw back the great bolts, ignoring his exasperated mutterings, and finally stepped out into the vast shining street; four days ago ... he had thought he was doing it because of her. For an hour or two he had walked the streets in a vision of golden crucifixion, each grimace of pain mirrored in Julia’s repentant face, looking up at him from the foot of the bloody cross.
But he soon forgot about her. She slipped his mind. No, she was not important; he was not doing this for her. It was more as if she were the last insignificant piece of a jigsaw puzzle it had taken him all his life to solve.
“Hello,” said the hunchback, delicately perching on the bench next to Frank. “I’m a reporter for Yellow Sheet. Do you mind if I talk to you?” He had been fitted with a specially tailored jacket which emphasised his hump, and subtle makeup made his thin sharp features even sharper.
Frank was fascinated by the makeup, which gave extreme heights and depths to the face, and by the great swell of the man’s back.
“Oh, yes,” said the hunchback, “it’s makeup and padding, they had to do it for my spot.”
Frank looked blank.
“My spot . . . it’s one of the most popular parts of the show apparently . . . it’s, er, it’s where someone who’s, er . . . afflicted . . . is, er, beaten up. If they don’t think you’re, er, unusual enough, they, er, try to help out a little . . .” He looked suddenly ashamed. “It’s for the paper, you see, only way I could get in to do the article. Authenticity, you know?”
Frank turned away. Even if the interview had been for the Sunday Times with perhaps a full-colour double spread, his vow of silence would have prevented him taking part. But with this crippled cub reporter and his toilet-paper rag ... it was ridiculous. Feeling his carefully built-up aloofness threatened, Frank moved farther along the bench and stared stonily into space.
But the hunchback was lost in his own little world. He set the tape moving and with the manner of a man addressing millions, began to speak into a small black microphone:
“I’m sitting here in the actors’ dressing room of London’s famous Thrill Palace, where Punishment Follies has been playing to packed houses for over a year, and I’m about to talk to the actor filling tonight’s star part. Why do these men submit to commercially-staged punishment, and some even to death? Is it the money, or is there some deeper reason? Perhaps our star for tonight will enlighten us?” He looked expectantly at Frank, moving the microphone under his nose.
Frank found himself wondering what the medical term for a hump on the back was. He felt a strange urge to run his hands over it. He would have liked to be one of the men who would administer the hunchback’s beating tonight.
The hunchback coughed and looked nervously at the guards. “Er, I’m sure our readers would be very grateful for anything you’d care to say, er . . . sir . . . er, anything you’d like to add as to, er, exactly, er . . . exactly why you’re here . . .”
The directness of the question panicked Frank, and he began a complicated game which involved pressing the knuckle of his right thumb five times with his left thumb and then the knuckle of his left thumb five times with his right thumb, the whole being repeated five times until five sets of five had been achieved. But it was not enough. The question hummed in his head. The thought of dying pointlessly, like the C.U.D. suicides, filled him with horror.
He imagined the hunchback talking nervously to a C.U.D. priest, holding his microphone up to the clean-shaven face, backing slowly and reluctantly to the wide-open door of the air freighter, hesitating momentarily on the lip of the booming space, and then, in helpless response to the bland, emptily smiling face, ruefully stepping out into air, falling like a sack of brittle sticks towards the wheeling ground, talking, talking into his microphone, apologizing to the telephoto lens with his smile. The image was so persuasive that Frank almost smiled to himself.
The audience roared above him and there was a spate of wild clapping and cheering. “Number twenty-six,” called the attendant. The emaciated man with the crucifixion part stood up and left the dressing room. Frank stared after him, ignoring the hunchback’s nervous questions. Presently the sound of hammering floated down from the stage. The audience was silent.
Frank turned his attention to the hunchback, and saw that the guards were standing behind him, grinning. One of them tapped him on the hump and said, “You’re on next, mate—severe beating, aren’t you?” The hunchback smiled sickly and made to unhook the recorder strap from his shoulders. “Oh, that’s all right,” said the guard, “we’ll take care of that for you . . . wouldn’t want any of this lot to nick it now, would we?”
They led him away, walking so quickly that he was almost running between them.
Presently a storm of applause floated down from above. Frank had a sudden vision of faces composed of wet slabs of flesh with ears and lips stuck on like lumps of modelling clay, saliva dribbling over stubble and face powder, eyes bright and blank and unblinking, limbs of monumental heaviness stacked against each other like lengths of waterlogged timber. And hands, great soggy puddings of hands, colliding damply with each other, dumb and contented in the warm darkness. Pigs away from the sty for a night, sitting upright and snorting. The old hatred built within him, blistering, bringing tears to his eyes, grinding his teeth together. He wanted to rampage among them with an axe and kill until his whole body was red with blood, he wanted to break and maim and chop and slash until the pieces of the broken bodies could never be fitted together again, he wanted to kill them all and stand triumphant on a mound of severed heads.
But the anger died in his chest as it always did, as if he were filling up with ash. He had never been able to release his hatred because he knew that he would be unable to control himself if he did; he knew that only the destruction of the world could satisfy him. Standing up to his knees in a river of blood, bodies floating and turning like drifting spars as far as the eye could see, the last man left alive on earth, hands covered in blood . . .
He was trembling violently, and he clasped his hands tightly together between his legs in an effort to still himself. The guards returned to the dressing room and he quickly picked up an Instapape someone had left on the bench and forced himself to read, quickly turning the flimsy yellow pages:
millionaire shot dead by his own dog
Armaments millionaire Johann Kreuz was today shot dead by his own dog, a three-year-old bull-terrier named Nicki. Kreuz, who was out hunting, left his loaded double-barrelled shotgun on the back seat of his car with the dog. Nicki’s lead tangled in the trigger-guard and when she jumped out of the car to greet her master—
The guards laughed as they smashed the hunchback’s tape recorder. Frank turned the page:
trafalgar square riot spreads
The riot which began earlier today in Trafalgar Square, scene of a C.U.D. mass-suicide demonstration, has spread down Whitehall to Parliament Square where riot troops have just begun to use automatic weapons on the mob. A smaller riot, started by commuters unable to get to Charing Cross Station because of the riot-barriers which were closed on the south side of the Square, is under control, but the barriers have had to be closed on the Shaftesbury Avenue side of Piccadilly Circus—
“Goodbye,” said the little man. He smiled at him as he was led from the room. Frank was alone with the guards. No escape, he thought.
more to be squeezed into hackney high-rises
The GLC announced today that the density quota of the Hackney high-rise estate is to be increased by 50% to cope with overspill from inner-city areas. This will mean dormitory accommodation for most of the estate’s 48,000 tenants, but Mr. Albert Cooper, spokesman of the Tenants’ Association, threatens that—
The smell of soggy cabbage and urine was heavy in Frank’s nostrils. He was one of the tenants of the Hackney estate, and the article had instantly created for him its powerful all-pervading smell. Fifty percent increase! As it was, his room was only a partitioned section of an access corridor, barely large enough to lie down flat in. But even that was preferable to sleeping in a dormitory with pigs.
Things were going to get worse. It was clear to him now. Soon the world would consist of armed camps, and after that, naked savages in mud-pits. Somehow, gradually, quietly and powerfully, life had become unbearable; a threshold had been crossed and the long slide into coldness and darkness had begun. The only salvation was to go inside and carefully lock and bolt all the doors, shutter the windows, turn out the lights, douse the fire, and wait in perfect quiet, alone. His retreat into himself was complete. There was nothing outside worth seeing. Only endless vistas of pale molluscs jerking back into darkness as sunlight swept over their undersea depths.
He felt that his actions were being endorsed, and when the hand grasped his shoulder, he was ready.
“Wake up, mate,” said the guard, “You’re on next.”
Frank stood. He adjusted the waistband of his breeches. He coughed.
The guards took his arms and led him out of the dressing room. He saw the dingy corridor in absolute detail: olive-green paint, bubbling and cracking; grey concrete floor where his footballs created eddies of sluggish dust; white ceiling where islands of paint were surrounded by seas of bare plaster, fed by spidery cracks. One of the attendants had blood on his toe-cap, the other had tiny spots of blood on his trousers. A black beetle edged into a crack beneath the skirting board as they bore down on it.
Applause broke out wildly above and the attendants grinned at each other. Footsteps ahead told them that someone was coming along the narrow corridor, and they stopped opposite a room with an open door and moved close in to the wall. The interior of the room looked like a medical tent set up in the middle of a field during some bloody Civil War battle. Two men in white overalls were swabbing blood from the surface of a large wooden table; a man with a white mask over his face was threading a large surgical needle with black cotton. Actors and actresses sat on benches around the walls. Some were unconscious, some moaned softly, some were rocking backwards and forwards as if comforting themselves. One man was slowly licking his lips, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Frank saw the hunchback. His face was bloody. And elated.
The little man with the bruised face came along the corridor, supported by two attendants. He was barely conscious. A red stump protruded from his right sleeve. Something was sticking out of the long pocket of his costume. It was a finger. The pocket was slowly staining red. He was taken into the medical room and laid out on the table. Frank imagined him painfully raising himself on one arm, waving his stump, and saying, “Hat-trick—got my hat-trick.” But the little man simply lay there, breathing heavily. The doctor began to tend to the stump.
They continued along the corridor and came into the backstage area. Skirting two glowing braziers in which branding-irons rested, and a long upturned blade mounted on wooden trestles, one of which had a damaged leg (“. . . and now the bloody Spanish Mare’s got a broken leg . . .”) the attendants brought Frank into the wings and stopped him. He could see the stage clearly. It was covered with sawdust, stained red. Instruments of pain and torture hung from iron racks. A wooden gallows was being erected in center stage. On a large cross stage right, the emaciated man hung from coach-nails driven through his hands and feet, moaning softly.
The lights went down and a white spotlight played on the black-clad men working on the gallows. A dim red spot focussed on the face of the crucified man. A voice rang out from the speakers, the kind of effortlessly patronising voice used on popular educational programmes on television. It said: “Since man began to walk upright, he has found it necessary to punish those members of his race who do not conform to popularly accepted Law. In primitive times the tribe would simply stone the lawbreaker to death, but as man became more sophisticated, so he created more sophisticated methods of execution. The ancient Egyptians, for example ...”
The voice faded from Frank’s consciousness. He had often felt that many hidden doors would be opened to him if he could release his hatred, that he would be made new in the clean flame of revealed desire. That his desire meant death and pain to others, seemed nothing now, although it had always kept him sealed like a blast-furnace before. Always the anger had been turned inward until the gnaw of self-inflicted pain was second nature to him. Now the ultimate self-hurt. And by some strange reversal he realised that his pain would be felt by the others, his death would spread through the world like a cancer, turning blood into powder, bones into dust. By killing himself, he was killing them, every one. He was about to snuff the world out of existence.
The gallows was complete. A man in black tights and a black mask was standing on the platform, slowly knotting the noose.
“The Spaniards,” said the narrator, “have long favoured the garotte ...”
Frank felt a glacial calmness—a motionlessness of the spirit that was almost frightening. He stood alone, in the safety of his own body, unassailable and perfect. No one was connected to him, there were no decaying memories of people in the corners of the little fortress in his head from which he observed the world in darkness and silence. I am one, he thought, whole and indivisible.
He drew himself up and squared his shoulders. They tied his hands behind his back and tried to put a black bag over his head. He refused it, and began to touch each of his teeth with the tip of his tongue, first from the back, and then from the front. Three threes before they took him on stage.
“. . . in regular use in this country until twenty years ago. Tonight we re-stage an execution by hanging for your entertainment. A man will die here before your eyes. The hangman is a direct descendant of Pierpoint, the last great artist of this method of execution, but remember—should he fail to gauge the weight of our victim correctly and shorten or lengthen the rope accordingly . . . death will be a long time coming . . . the hanged man will kick and jerk for some time before slow strangulation causes his heart to stop beating. Of course, we all hope that our hangman will be efficient . . . but only the next few minutes will tell. Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you—death by hanging. “
The lights went down. A drum-roll began. The hangman jumped heavily on the trap and then beckoned to the wings.
And suddenly Frank was on stage, smelling the bloodstained sawdust, and off to his right was a great emptiness that drew in its breath and waited. His bowels loosened; his penis stood suddenly and painfully erect. They dragged him up the steps. The smell of the pine overpowering, misting vision, fainting in anticipated pain. Before him the noose, rough and hairy. The nose-tickling smell of the rope. Ah, around his neck. Blood roaring, roaring in his ears. A sudden bang. A feeling of lightness.
I never touched her.
I can’t remember her name.
Light spinning, sound throbbing, and the emptiness was faces; ah, yes—faces all looking at
The emptiness sighed.