Bad deeds escalate: even little ones. They get tossed like a magic ball between one human being and another, back and forth, getting bigger every time: you did this so I’ll do that, until the hands cannot hold it, the burden is too great: and the ball falls, and bursts, and turns out to be full of some kind of murderous corrosive acid which, once it begins to flow, cannot be stopped; a whole river of malice, burning, maiming, killing as it goes, and widows, and widowers too these days, and orphans weep every time a wrong is righted, and people hop around the street blinded or one-legged, and then the flow of malice slows to a trickle, and stops and dries up, like the chain reaction from the first atomic bombs over New Mexico. It’s finished. The ball’s empty. But terrible until it is. So never say a harsh word if you can say a kind one: it may be you who starts the war.
‘Dirty Catholic!’ you say, or ‘stupid Irish’ or ‘I hate all Americans’ or ‘pinko Commies’. Don’t! Don’t! Or, ‘She shrunk my sweatshirt so I’ll stay out all night’ or ‘He crashed my car so I’ll phone his wife’. Don’t! Stop it! Click, click! ‘Car Bomb Massacre – 40 dead’, ‘Broken-home child in suicide bid!’, ‘Wife and lover in Deep Freeze Horror!’ ‘Terrorist dies in police station leap.’
If Muffin had not told Joan Lumb about Mew’s photographs, everything might have been different.
If Murray had been more responsive to Joan Lumb, who loved and admired him above all men, excepting only Henry Shrapnel, and he was dead, everything would have been different. (Joan Lumb avoided Murray after dinner. She was hurt because her company did not seem to make him happy, as his did her.)
If Shirley had not been such an easy prey to the prejudices and illusions of her time, and vain about her hands, and upset by the close attention Victor was paying to Bella—
If Victor had been more courteous: if Bella had recognised the existence of other women—
But Muffin, Murray, Joan Lumb, Victor, Shirley, Bella were the product of their times, as their parents had been before them, and the times move inexorably on from one recorded event to another, from Tiglath-Pileser to the man on the moon, and the times are too strong for them. How can anyone, Joan Lumb, Baf, the General, Hilda, Edna (remember her, the taxi driver?) stop scrambling up the slopes and turn and outface this frightful tidal wave of destiny? But it has to be done. It is all we can do. We are better, braver swimmers than we think.
Now.
Throughout the evening the staff had been gathering in the kitchens to celebrate and/or lament the passing and pulverising of Harry. Brown eyes clustered and gleamed in the dim light. (Joan Lumb insisted on low-wattage bulbs in the staff quarters. It was one of the economies of which she was most proud.) More and more came until finally there seemed to be a shifting yet solid wall ringing the cooking pot and chopping board, mostly coloured Muslim black and grey, patched by the blue of the worshippers of Mao and lightened by the occasional glimmer of Hindu silk. As the jigsaw surface changed and moved, gaps in the wall would appear, through which the occasional child would thrust a bare arm or leg, having successfully burrowed to the front, the better to be near the pot and the block, to catch the smell of the fall of the great, the humiliation of the oppressor. A susurration drifted up, along with the rank odour of Harry and the sweet lingering smell that badly boiled pumpkin and overcooked fish leave behind; it was composed of the murmurs and prayers of the old, and the low chattering of the young, and the sharp intakes of breath of the frightened and the soft ululations of the distressed, quickly hushed. This, all understood, was a moment of destiny. Nothing could be the same again.
Acorn stood upon a table to address the crowd. Silence fell; only Miriam’s baby, held in Matilda’s arms, lamented at the back of the room and wouldn’t be hushed. (Matilda had to go out with it.) Acorn spoke in English: his voice had gained that arrogant edge of the leader into violence: it is the voice of those who give permission to hate: who enlist God on the devil’s side. It is jagged-edged: into it fit, with the greatest ease, the matching jagged edges of anger, misery, spite, paranoia, self-pity, fear and loathing of every kind: it is Henry Shrapnel’s exploding cannonball put together again: and put together it appears as a nice round ball of self-righteousness.
‘We are the Family of the Unknown,’ cries Acorn to the crowd. ‘We are the People of Now. We are everywhere, yet we are nowhere. We are the brown, the black, the helpless hands which serve and are not seen.’
Reader, it is true. The hands that serve you, in any corner of the world, are mostly female, and usually brown, and for the most part go unnoticed; or stay anonymous. Who cleans your offices? Do you know? No. You’d rather not. Who stands in the steam to press your shirt: who cut the upper of your fashion boot? The Family of the Unknown, that’s who. The Myriad People of Now: the scuttling, scurrying, frightened, passive people of the earth, the dusters of cannon, the polishers of buttons. No wonder the staff listened now to Acorn.
Run the cannonball down a snowy slope; see it collecting snow, collecting support, getting bigger and bigger as it runs: the shrapnel of rage and right encased deep but certain below: oh, they were all ears! Who wouldn’t be, and the scent of Harry inflamed their senses with the notion that action is possible, revolutions happen, things change: and how handsome Acorn was: personable, powerful, frightening, but unfrightened. Pin your colours to that mast: oh yes, it is the only mast you have, and anyway, if you don’t it’ll only fall on you and crush you.
‘Brothers, sisters,’ said Acorn, and who could not want to be included in this family? ‘We will live no longer under the yoke of oppression; we will strike back: we will wipe out the transgressors against God. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’
A few faces looked puzzled. It seemed to them that there was a great deal to fear: homelessness, hunger, cold, prison, death. ‘Miriam is dead,’ said Acorn, in his new gritty, shrapnelly voice. ‘Murdered! A life for a life; a dozen of theirs must equal one of ours. Say to yourself, brothers, sisters, who harms my brother, my sister, in the Family of the Unknown, harms me. And vengeance must be ours!’
And if there were those who thought, well: it could be said equally that Acorn’s baby murdered its mother; or that Acorn’s refusal to let the medical services in hadn’t helped: or that Acorn’s sequestration of the meat money hadn’t helped Miriam’s health, no one said so. That Joan Lumb’s action in overlooking the formalities of visas and so forth might be construed as kindness (albeit mixed with self-interest) rather than simple exploitation went unremarked upon.
‘Brothers, sisters,’ said Acorn from his soap-box table, and his eyes rolled and his clenched fist struck into the heavy air, ‘death is nothing. Better we are all dead than live with shame another day!’
There came a slight harrumphing from the front. Inverness disengaged himself from the human jigsaw of the wall and sat upon the edge of the table, legs swinging, spectacles glinting. He seemed a very modest, small, elderly man, sitting thus at Acorn’s feet. Acorn’s legs were vast and tall above, like shiny pillars. Inverness smiled, in a situation and position where smiling seemed unthinkable. And, even as he smiled, he undermined Acorn’s case. Many trembled for Inverness’s sake. He would follow Harry into the pot if he wasn’t careful – or bits of him, which he’d then be obliged to eat, and probably not in sandwich form.
‘But what is our objective?’ asked Inverness, innocently, his head turned up towards Acorn. ‘What can be gained by violence? I have seen too much of it. So have most of us who make our refuge here. I quite agree: there must be change. But let us be reasonable, let us negotiate. Let us present our complaints in the proper way.’
‘You are a fool,’ said Acorn, but it was a mistake on his part to so much as acknowledge Inverness’s presence. Eyes turned to the older man’s face, and the slight, sad smile. Inverness had patched cuts, and delivered babies, and cured pain, and counselled patience and acceptance. And his courage was immense: he was a fish nibbling where the shark thought he oughtn’t.
‘I may be a fool,’ said Inverness, ‘but better a live fool than a dead hero.’
‘There are the words of a coward,’ said Acorn, ‘and a traitor to the Family of the Unknown, the People of Now.’
‘We are warm, we are fed, we are safe,’ said Inverness, leaving his perch upon the table rather suddenly, and returning to stand in front of the people’s wall, as if making himself their spokesman. ‘What more do we want?’
‘Dignity,’ said Acorn. ‘Justice. Vengeance. Blood.’
‘I would rather have a hot dinner any day,’ said Inverness, and around him people laughed.
‘This is no man! This is a woman who speaks,’ sneered Acorn, and the laughing quickly stopped. He pressed home his advantage. ‘This is a man who killed our sister by his neglect,’ said Acorn. ‘He is in the pay of our oppressors: he is a spy: he speaks for them, and not for you. He drips his words like poison. Shut your ears to them, my brothers and sisters, before they deafen you to the truth. Lo, the fruit of our hatred—’
And he held above his head the silver tray where the spirit of Harry rested, trapped between two slivers of bread, and a breath of wonder welled up like a current of air hot enough and strong enough to take the weight of the tray, so that it seemed to support itself, and not need Acorn’s hands at all, but just to float there. A miracle! Or was it a trick of the light?
‘The dog is dead!’ cried Acorn, ‘and yet it lives! Today they killed one of us and didn’t know it. Today they shall eat the dog and not know that.’
‘And what then?’ asked Inverness; though now elbows and shoulders obstructed him, tried to ease him away from the front of the crowd. ‘Detail, please. Detail!’
‘Then we will kill them,’ shrieked Acorn. ‘We will boil them alive.’
‘And what happens to us then?’ persisted Inverness, now from the depths of the crowd. ‘When the snow melts and the authorities arrive? When our crime is disclosed? What do we say? Perhaps that the entire dinner party was spirited away by flying saucers?’
‘Still piping away, woman?’ asked Acorn, dancing up and down with rage. ‘Careful, or I’ll tear your voice out of your woman’s throat! See these hands? They will crush the breath from the enemies of the People of Now. They will tear the flesh off the bones of our enemies. There will be a risotto: the most wonderful risotto the world has ever known. For once there will be no shortage of meat. We will eat the dinner party!’
Reader, you may think all this too crude, too simple, but have you listened to the Watergate Tapes? It is hard to imagine how barbarous the language of our leaders is, in private, how simple and emotive their judgements, how their love of money and power and vengeance rises to the surface like the white crust on boiling strawberry jam. They know no better than you or me; they behave a good deal worse. And how gullible we are, so long as it suits us! Oh, Nixon, you say! Nixon was an exception. Really? What about Gadddafi: how many children have been blown to bits since he made his first ‘sweep them into the sea’ speech twenty years ago? Since he first gave permission to hate? How many have died so the Basques can be free? Free from what? The Common Market? Oh, terror! Discover outrage, and a few good phrases, promise pain now and justice later, vengeance for past affronts and any Leader of Man’s away. If you belonged to the Family of the Unknown, the People of Now, what would you do? Fight back? Eat the dinner party? You bet! So would I. Can you imagine anything more tedious than Inverness’s proposed proper presentation of complaints? Acorn’s right. We don’t want him in the Family.
To get back to the matter of the possible eating of the dinner party, I find the very idea disconcerting, the more I consider it, and the idea is mine, so it may disconcert you, reader, even more. But in the scale of human depravity, is such a deed particularly bad? Victor, that very day, that equable family man, and though indirectly, had been the cause of several deaths by malnutrition in southern India. That is to say, they would not have died had Chewinox not pulled out of the area. The handsome and virile General, as we know, had many thousands of deaths to his credit and could happily contemplate more. Lovely Baf was a dealer in death and pain. Panza and Sergei sent weariness and depression abroad; fed it into the hearts of the young. Murray killed with his bare hands. If death deserves death, then surely they deserved to die? And all, what is more, killed those who had never offended them. Now Acorn was personally upset, affronted and damaged by the behaviour of Upstairs, and yet his reaction, to kill, cook and eat, and thus incorporate and control the evil, seems to us on the instant far more reprehensible than anything perpetrated by his putative victims. At any rate it does to me.