Out of Time (22 page)

Otto continued.

‘These are real forms of afterlife and add up to the kind of survival that we at least find satisfying. What’s more, our version stimulates great kindness and consideration, better efforts to improve the world, it gives people a sense of responsibility. And as I said, we don’t have to be bribed with some fairy tale vision. I think that’s important.’

‘People in my world don’t look at them as fairy tales. They believe they’re real. They believe that God in heaven is looking after them all through their lives and afterwards. That’s comforting.’

‘It’s not comfort we’re after, but the truth. That’s all you’ve got to live by. The truth.’

‘Truth is what you believe. What’s more, our god helps us by giving absolution, divine forgiveness for our wickedness on Earth. In the Christian religions anyway. He forgives before we die. He’ll even forgive someone evil like Helmuth.’

‘He may, but posterity won’t. I want no truck with your nebulous deity if he hands out pardons to all and sundry, regardless of what kind of lives they have led.

‘So what do you want to do? Get your revenge on Helmuth? Kill him if you can?’

Understanding that Joe had laid a trap and could easily gain the moral high ground Otto hesitated, but honesty compelled him to say,

‘Yes, and all the tyrants. Think of how many people they have killed!’

‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’

‘You mean revenge? If you like.’

‘We at least have got beyond that. We at least give people the right to defend themselves, to state their case. However evil, they’re still humans! In our society everyone has the right to justice.’

‘Do they always get it?’

‘No. But the principle remains.’

*

The committee is unable to devise a way in which Susie can let them know that she is safe once she has escaped. She cannot predict where she will be nor how she can get in touch. There are too many factors to be taken into consideration, too many unforeseen events. As no one else can leave until they get the go-ahead from Susie, the children are once again faced with an intractable problem.

The most expedient method would be to use Margaret’s relative to pass a message, but it means that Susie has to get back to the dungeon’s entrance without being seen. Fairfax Road is a long way away and the children are, in any case, anxious not to implicate their ally.

They conclude that Susie should devise her own method of getting in contact once she knows how the land lies. They will be on the lookout for anything unusual.

‘Your writing,’ Ian says ‘perhaps we can use it now.’

‘How?’ Susie asks.

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps you can scratch an agreed letter on the sides of the empty wheelies before they’re brought back for filling up; or drop a message inside one. Or something,’ he adds lamely.

It is very difficult to come up with an answer. Susie will have to use her ingenuity.

*

As Joe and the community tried to come to terms with each other’s worlds, these intense debates, sometimes reaching long into the night, became a regular feature of their lives. Similarities and differences were evaluated and compared, discussed and analysed. Joe was at an advantage for he lived in their world and had lived in his own. Because their experience was one-sided they were frequently unable to grasp the foreign concepts which he tried to describe.

This in particular was the case with money.

‘Why would goods have a value other than their own?’ Randolph asked.

It was not an easy question to answer. As Joe’s knowledge of the workings of international trade was at best limited, he concentrated on explaining supply and demand.

‘Necessities, food, clothes, don’t change their worth,’ Randolph pointed out.

‘They do if a lot of people want them, and there is a shortage, or even a glut.’

‘A meal is a meal, a loaf of bread a loaf of bread. Once you start equating them with something meaningless like your coins,’ Randolph said, ‘they are degraded.’

‘Or upgraded. Say you were short of corn one year and everybody wanted some. That would alter the value and in our world the price. While you express it in, say, the number of goats per ton of oats we use coins. But the principle remains. The list of the barter value of goods in Volume One states the price of goods quite clearly.’

‘It doesn’t change. It stays the same summer and winter, good years and bad. What’s more, we can see what we’ve bought. It’s tangible. And it is, or at least was, common to the whole country. Everyone knows what everything is worth and when there’s a shortage, say due to a severe winter, we share.’

‘And if there’s a glut?’

‘Doesn’t make any difference.’

It was impossible to explain world trade, different currencies, companies, corporations, stocks and shares, free trade, the fluctuations of global markets. Joe did not even try. He could hardly understand them himself. As it was the group listened with growing bewilderment to his description of the urban sprawl that left England without wild beasts, forests or space.

‘The world population is growing. By the end of this century there will be seven hundred billion people on Earth.’

‘Seven hundred billion!’

They tried to comprehend such numbers of human beings.

‘What happens when the world is overrun?

‘Time will tell but it may never happen. People die of diseases. Even with modern medicine these have not been eliminated. As soon as we cure one, another springs up. Nature used to maintain a balance though it’s losing the battle now. And we have our own method of keeping the numbers down. Organised slaughter. In polite circles we call it war. It has all kinds of benefits attached to it, bringing advances in medicine and in science. It even has its own rules, like a game. And we’ve invented something called ethnic cleansing. This is quite simple - you kill anyone who is not of your colour or creed.’

‘We know something about that. It’s been happening to us for several hundred years.’

‘So you say. But how do you know? It’s all hearsay, nothing is recorded. How are future generations ever going to believe you?’

‘What future generations? We are the future generations.’

This brought Joe to a momentary halt.

‘All the same, I bet you never tell the same tale twice, I bet it gets changed over the years so that in the end it has probably been altered beyond recognition. We write our history down. You gave up writing it. Why?’

‘We prefer to preserve our history by word of mouth,’ Randolph said.

‘Doesn’t it change with every storyteller?’

‘Of course. What do you think history is?’

‘The recording of facts from the past so that they can be passed accurately to the future.’

‘Accurately,’ Kathryn said, ‘that’s an illusion. Events are accurate to one person alone.’

‘Who?’

‘The person who experiences them. For each individual the so-called accuracy is different. Accuracy does not exist, it’s a disembodied concept.’

‘What about the facts?’

‘There are hundreds of facts for each event. If you went round this table and asked each person to give an exact account of their experiences, few facts would be the same; like Otto’s grandfather taking his life.’

‘That’s a fact, isn’t it?

‘Possible but uncertain,’ Otto said, ‘ maybe his partner killed him. I have no means of telling. I’ve tried to get at the truth and I’ve talked about it to many people but each one gave a different version. Maybe none is true. Who can tell?’

‘But we have hundreds of people doing research, writing books, striving to present history as it was.’

Joe remembered ruefully the long hours of frustration he had spent at school trying to bring alive the history being taught. Much of it had seemed flat and boring, bearing little relation to people alive or dead. Was it possible that events died when imprisoned inside the covers of a book, that they could only fly and soar when related to individuals who had lived them, as had the people round this table? We have none of these advantages, he thought, we cannot talk to people who experienced events countless years ago.

‘At least we have first hand accounts written down. That’s almost the same.’

Joe was being forced into an analysis of his complex world. He had never questioned its values and had always taken for granted all the luxury, comfort and benefits it offered. But these, he saw, ran alongside the more sinister aspects of modern life, normally buried in the pleasure-seeking ethos of his generation. This last he now viewed with a sense of unease, not unmixed with longing. Self-indulgent their lives might be but they were easy and pleasurable. Here life was hard, dangerous and uncomfortable. Principles were maintained at a high price.

In some respects the two worlds were mirror images of each other. Power was equated with evil and imperialism while a minority of liberal people tried to maintain their humanity. It was the scale that was different and the means.

I’ve listened and listened and I’ve learned that I would never fit into Joe’s world. Even if I could reach it I’d be a lost soul, a burden and an embarrassment. There’s no place for me there. He knows that though he won’t admit it, but there’s anyway no chance. I’m excluded, cut off from Joe’s real life. Once he goes I’ll vanish as though I’d never been, and when I said this to him in a despairing moment he denied it vehemently. He believes he’ll love me forever and perhaps he may, perhaps our destinies are intertwined no matter where we are, in two worlds or in one; but I’m still afraid, he could disappear suddenly, without warning, without wanting to. We’re puppets, we have no control, we’re worked at the end of someone else’s string, manipulated perhaps by this god of Joe’s who’s decided to mix our worlds, allowed us to taste the nectar of our love only to torture us by taking it away.

I live in ecstasy and in fear.

*

The committee has not abandoned its aim to free all the children in the dungeon, as well as all who are prisoners in the town. They plan to find the children kept in hiding by their parents and rescue those snatched by the State. They discuss the possibilities night after night, making plans that are unrealistic and overly ambitious, though of this they are unaware. For the time being they must concentrate their efforts on escaping and reaching the outside world. Only then they can decide on their next step.

‘Fairfax Road is the agreed meeting place,’ Ian says.

‘What happens if it is occupied, if I can’t use it?’ Susie asks.

‘We’ll have Jarvis Road as the next port of call.’

‘And if that doesn’t work?’

Ian shrugs.

‘It’s impossible to plan for everything.’

*

‘This house is rather sad,’ Joe said one day, ‘most of it is empty, echoing with lives that no longer exist.’

He wondered if he had been tactless and hurt Kathryn but he had come to love the house in a way he had never loved his own. It held a mysterious familiarity as though he had always belonged to it and it had been waiting for him. He felt the welcome in its rooms and rambling corridors, silent guardians of a thousand secrets whispered inside walls in which sometimes, if he listened attentively, he could faintly discern the long low murmur of dead souls. They spoke to him and recognised him as one of their own. This was home; he wanted to open all its windows and let in light and love. He wanted to wake it from its sleep.

‘Yes, that’s why I never go into the empty rooms.’ ‘Perhaps we can heal their souls,’ Joe said. ‘I can think of a way.

‘Can you now?’

The next night she appeared with pillows and a feather duvet.

‘This way.’

She led Joe into the long room and they threw open the shutters and let in the night air. They could feel the room breathe with joy as, beneath the benign eye of the carving, they made love the night through.

‘In memory,’ Kathryn said.

‘In love.’

He felt as though he had sealed a bargain.

‘Not only in here.’

‘No.’

They visited every room in turn and if the others knew or heard they did not comment. Perhaps they heard the murmurs too.

ENJOYMENT was low on the list of the group’s priorities, leisure almost unknown, work constant, the underlying dread of an attack sapping energy. To this was added, in Joe’s case, the unrelenting travails of the last year. Too much to absorb, too much to understand. Exhausted, mind and spirit weary, he needed space in which to do nothing and to dream.

It was not politic to ask outright for days off. The community was in need and unused to easing their vigilance but Joe succeeded in introducing the concept of holidays or days off by subtle insinuation. Not in vain. A meeting was held and, with the surprising support of Otto, it was decided that, so long as no immediate danger threatened, everyone was allowed one day free every two weeks. A meagre allowance Joe thought, but better than nothing.

Meredith seized the chance to absorb himself further in his abstract calculations concerning the heavens and beyond. From time to time he tried explaining some of this to Joe, whose interest was genuine but comprehension limited. Meredith spoke in tongues, in his case a mathematical language he had invented for himself. Joe understood in principle but could not follow in detail.