The Flame of Life

CHAPTER SEVEN

He weighed five thousand tons, not feathers but concrete — the weight of weights when it came to scales. He’d have got up in spite of it, but there was an ant sleeping on top of the five thousand tons, which made such a difference that he couldn’t shift a limb, not a hair, not a fingernail. He loathed that slumbering ant which stopped him moving.

Yet he didn’t want to get up. Time went quickly. When you were out of bed it went slowly because you were expected to do things. He could not get up because he liked lying there, though the sensation of staying in bed was edging slightly towards pain. Whether this far-off ache was due to the weight on him, or because his moral fibre was out of control, he did not know. He was too tired to find out.

Last night he’d been starving-hungry, and thought of the delicious breakfast he’d have when he got up — knowing that when he did he might be too idle to eat. But feeling ravenous had made him think of his past life, so he didn’t mind it at all.

A blur of sun made a slit at the curtains. If they were drawn back it would flood in, warming the carpet for flies to play on. He would sweat then, unable to throw back the blankets. These irritating thoughts lessened the five thousand tons of concrete on top of him. Maybe the ant would jump off.

At the same time, and perhaps because of this weight, he took pleasure in his helplessness, a fair indulgence when living in a community. What else was such a place for? The disadvantages were otherwise so great they could never outweigh the shame that a man with pride must feel at being here.

A black cloth-like bluebottle woke from the ceiling and made towards him like a rocket pulled by the sun. It touched his right temple, picked up the ant from the concrete, and flew away, a morning bout of nature that seemed all it could do at the moment.

He smiled at the decrease of weight. The door snapped open, kicked against the wall where a knob-dent had already been worn. Mandy came in with his breakfast tray. ‘You idle bed-rat. When are you going to get up?’

It was two weeks since her miscarriage and, he was glad to see, it hadn’t left a mark on her. She was thinner than before her pregnancy, which might not be saying much, since she was almost plump again instead of merely gross. Mandy’s glory was her long straight hair, tied with a purple ribbon and swaying down her well-padded back.

At eighteen her face had lost that live pale marble of early youth, though the newly sallow look gave her a more attractive waywardness. She was continually forced into brash assertions of independence so as to bring out that pure sense of her own dignity which all during childhood she had been unable to show in such a large family. And now this community stunt, she thought, had thrown her back to square one, forcing her once more to open her mouth loud every time she wanted something.

In spite of his five thousand tons Cuthbert was able to turn his head and smile. ‘It’s nice to be awakened by such a charming sister. Did Ralph roll on top of you last night and forget to get off till daybreak?’

She stood over him, lovable, beautiful and foul-mouthed: ‘I’ll tip this hot coffee over you if you don’t stop calling Ralph, you bone-idle two-faced queer.’

‘I suppose anybody is queer,’ he said, ‘if they don’t go to bed with you. But I’m your brother, remember? Dad wouldn’t like it. And he’s your father. He’d be jealous. I know what goes on between you.’

She set the tray on his bedside table. He’d gone so far into the sludge of his mind there was nothing left to be angry about. ‘You’d better get up. The meeting begins’ in half an hour. Dad says if you aren’t there they’ll come up and lob you out of the window. You’re such a rotten bastard you’d burst when you hit the ground, even if you fell on soil. Or you’d dent one of the caravans with your dead weight. Be a pity. Cost a bob or two, them caravans did.’

The more she wanted to rile him the viler her accent got. She could put on a posh tone with no effort at all, speak speech in fact so purely demure that no one would guess her true base lingo. But she brutalised her tongue to remind him how he used to talk, and still wanted to from time to time but didn’t for fear of giving himself away. Often he’d curse his luck at being born in England instead of France or Spain where, he’d heard, a beggar’s accent could be the same as the king’s. At college he’d choked back any trace of picturesque dialect or voluble argot, though when he’d perfected his aural neutrality and could expatiate with fair surety without giving himself away he discovered to his delight that if in an argument he switched into rabid and aggressive slang his opponents, where once they had been contemptuous of his voice, now became wary and impressed by it. They knew his self-assurance in their language and habits, but they could never be at all confident in his.

‘Sweetness and light,’ he said, pouring coffee.

She stood by the door. ‘Myra set your breakfast out, not me. I only brought it up to please her. She don’t want any trouble. I don’t know why, though. It’s liver and chops to this family. We’d starve without it. When there’s no more trouble we’ll pack our cardboard suitcases and go our separate ways. If she wants to get rid of us, all she’s got to do is bring about a state of peace. The place ’ud empty in two minutes. Maybe that’s what she’s aiming at. I wouldn’t blame her. I bet she rues the day she let our lot in.’

‘You’re too rational,’ he said, spreading butter over the toast, his mouth full of bacon. ‘I don’t like you in that mood. You forgot the newspapers, by the way.’

‘They didn’t come. There’s a strike on.’

A twitch in his knee almost jerked the coffee over. ‘What are the lousy bone-idle improvident working-class shirkers downing tools for this time? It’s shameful. When my National Theocracy gets in you can say goodbye to strikes. They’ll be working double time at the incense factories, and building cathedrals in every street.’

‘Roger and Richard,’ she said, to needle him more, ‘know the man who led the walk out. They even sent money to his strike committee.’

‘They’re on strife,’ he mused, cutting up his egg, ‘not strike. That’s what it is. They’ve got no god left, and they get bored. I understand. Well, why are you standing there? Why aren’t you downstairs pushing that vacuum cleaner around in your useless way? Or are you on strife, too?’

The pips of her eyes seemed to split two ways: ‘One night, when you’re asleep, I’m going to come up here and cut you into little bits. ‘You’re so dead from the scrotum up you wouldn’t know till it was too late. You’re just a sponging marauder living off everybody’s good nature. You always have been and always will be. I hope I’m wrong, but I know I’m not. We all know where you go for hours at a time. You go to Uncle John’s room. I expect you’ve got a corpse up there that you’re sucking the blood out of and wanking off at.’

He appealed to her in an amicable voice: ‘Get me some more coffee. I can’t do with less than a quart in the morning.’

‘You don’t deserve it.’

He leaned on his pillow, and bellowed in a voice no one would suspect in him, so that the bedrail shook: ‘Get out then, you useless slut, and leave me alone. They can hold their meeting without me.’

The skin on the left part of her forehead, and towards the bridge of her nose, wrinkled in a charming manner. It showed him that she was disturbed, and didn’t know how to act. It marked the edge of her tolerance, the beginning of vulnerability. It was nice to know she had limits, that there was a point at which her shame and pride (and even modesty) came out. As a very small girl her skin had wrinkled at this position when anyone indulged in undue spite or injustice towards her, and it was always the prelude to tantrums or tears. But now she simply walked away, and it almost made him feel sorry for her.

As the door closed he leapt out of bed, the five-thousand-ton-weight of sloth dissolved by Mandy’s humanity in deigning to quarrel with him. He would go to the meeting, in spite of misgivings as to why it had been called. He put on a black collarless shirt over his vest, and fished a pair of old flannels from the bottom of the wardrobe. This garb was sure to ripple their communal equanimity, though he saw only innocence in it, especially when he wrapped a red cravat around his neck. One didn’t want to go too far and leave everything black. As for the rule that one should not lounge in Uncle John’s room in case its sanctity was blasted by too much common breath, such ordinances could only come from God — either direct, or through His Chosen Representative On Earth, he decided, moving the gun to another hiding-place.