The Wanting Seed (12 page)

Part Three

One

A
WET
August and a parched September, but the sickness of the world’s grain crops seemed to ride, like an aircraft, above the weather. It was a blight never known before, its configuration under the microscope not cognate with any other pattern of disease, and it proved resistant to all the poisons the Global Agricultural Authority could devise. But it was not only rice, maize, barley, oats and wheat that were affected: fruit fell off the trees and the hedges, stricken with a sort of gangrene; potatoes and other roots became messes of black and blue mud. And then there was the animal world: worms, coccidiosis, scaly leg, marble bone disease, fowl cholera, prolapse of the oviduct, vent gleet, curled toe paralysis, slipped hock disease – these were just a few of the maladies that struck the hen batteries and turned them into feathery morgues. Shoals of rotting fish corpses were washed ashore on the north-east coast during early October; the rivers stank.

The Right Hon. Robert Starling, Prime Minister, lay awake in an October night, tossing alone in his double bed, his catamite having been banished from it. His head was full of voices – voices of the experts who said they didn’t know, they just didn’t know; voices of the fanciful who blamed stowaway viruses in returned
moon-rockets; panicky fruity voices of the last Enspun Premiers’ Conference saying, ‘We can get through this year, we can just about get through this year, but wait till next –’ And one very privy voice whispered statistics and showed, against the blackness of the bedroom, horrific lantern slides. ‘Here we see the last food riot in Cooch Behar, dealt with most summarily, four thousand shovelled into a common grave, plenty of phosphorus pentoxide there, eh? And now we have highly coloured famine in Gulbarga, Bangalore and Rajura: look closely, admire those rib – cages. We turn now to Nyasaland: starvation in Livingstonia and Mpika. Mogadishu in Somalia – that was great fun for the vultures. And now we cross the Atlantic –’

‘No! No! No!’ The Right Hon. Robert Starling shouted so loud that he awoke his little friend Abdul Wahab, a brown boy who slept on a truckle-bed in the Right Hon. Robert Starling’s dressing-room. Abdul Wahab came running in, knotting a sarong round his middle. He switched on the light.

‘What is it? What’s the matter, Bobby?’ The melting brown eyes were full of concern.

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing we can do anything about. Go back to bed. I’m sorry I woke you.’

Abdul Wahab sat on the edge of the bouncy mattress and stroked the Prime Minister’s forehead. ‘There,’ he said. ‘There, there, there.’

‘They all seem to think,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘that we’re in this game for our own ends. They think I’m in love with power.’ He closed his eyes gratefully to the cool stroking. ‘They don’t know, they just don’t know the first thing about it.’

‘Of course they don’t.’

‘It’s all for their own good, everything we do is for their own good.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘How would they like to be in my position? How would they like to have the responsibility and the heartbreak?’

‘They wouldn’t stand it for one minute.’ Wahab went on soothing with his cool brown hand.

‘You’re a good boy, Wahab.’

‘Oh, not really.’ He simpered.

‘Yes, you’re a good boy. What are we going to do, Wahab, what are we going to do?’

‘Everything will be all right, Bobby. You’ll see.’

‘No, everything won’t be all right. I’m a liberal, I believe in man’s ability to control the world about him. We don’t just leave things to chance. The whole planet is dying, and you say everything will be all right.’

Abdul Wahab changed’ hands; his master was lying at a very awkward angle. ‘I’m not very clever,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand politics. But I always thought that the big trouble was having too many people in the world.’

‘Yes, yes. That is our great problem.’

‘But not now, surely? The population is being very quickly reduced, isn’t that so? People are dying of not having enough to eat, aren’t they?’

‘You foolish boy. You very nice but very foolish boy. Don’t you see, you foolish boy, that we could, if we wanted, kill off three-quarters of the world’s population like that –’ He snapped finger and thumb. ‘– Just like that? But government is not concerned with killing but III
with keeping people alive. We outlawed war, we made war a terrible dream of the past; we learned to predict earthquakes and conquer floods; we irrigated desert places and made the ice – caps blossom like a rose. That is progress, that is the fulfilment of part of our liberal aspirations. Do you understand what I’m saying, you foolish boy?’

Abdul Wahab tried to yawn with his mouth closed, smiling tight-lipped.

‘We removed all the old natural checks on population,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘
Natural checks
– what a cynical and sinister term. The history of man is the history of his control over his environment. True, we have often been let down. The greater part of mankind is not yet ready for the Pelagian ideal, but soon perhaps they may be. Perhaps very soon. Perhaps already they are learning. Learning through pain and privation. Ah, what a wicked world, a foolish world.’ He sighed deeply. ‘But what are we going to do? The shadow of famine stalks the world and we are caught in its clutches.’ He frowned at that metaphor but let it pass. ‘All our scientific knowledge and skill are set at nought by this menace.’

‘I’m not very clever,’ said Wahab again. ‘My people used to do not very clever things when they thought the harvest might be bad or the fish fail to bite. They did perhaps very foolish things. One thing they used to do was to pray.’

‘Pray?’ said the Prime Minister. ‘When we pray we admit defeat. There is no place for prayer in a liberal society. Moreover, there is nothing to pray to.’

‘My people,’ said stroking Wahab eagerly, ‘had many
things to pray to. But mostly they prayed to what they called Allah.’ He pronounced the name in the strict Arabic way, with a great curled 1 and a harsh snore at the end.

‘Another name for God,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘God is the enemy. We have conquered God and tamed him into a comic cartoon character for children to laugh at. Mr Livedog. God was a dangerous idea in people’s minds. We have rid the civilized world of that idea. Do go on stroking, you lazy boy.’

‘And,’ said Wahab, ‘if praying was no good, then they used to kill something. That was meant to be a sort of present, you see. They used to call it
madzbuh
. If you wanted a really big favour then you offered up something very big, very important. You made a present of an important man, such as the Prime Minister.’ ‘If that is meant to be funny I don’t consider it to be very funny,’ huffed the Right Hon. Robert Starling. ‘you can be a very facetious boy sometimes.’

‘Or the King,’ said Wahab, ‘if you happened to have one.’

The Prime Minister thought about that. Then he said, ‘You’re full of the silliest ideas, you silly boy. And you’re forgetting that, even if we did want to sacrifice the King, there’s nothing to sacrifice him to.’

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Wahab, ‘this thing has a sort of understanding. This thing, I mean, that’s stalking the earth like a shadow with claws. You could pray to that.’

‘That,’ said the Prime Minister, huffily again, ‘was a rather inept personification on my part. Inept figures of speech are the very stuff of political oratory.’

‘What,’ asked Wahab, ‘is personification?’

‘You pretend that something has life when it really hasn’t. A kind of animism. Do you know that word, you ignorant boy?’

Wahab smiled. ‘I’m very stupid,’ he said, ‘and I know very few words. Years and years ago my people used to pray to trees and rivers, pretending that these things could hear and understand. You would regard them as very foolish, being a great man and a Prime Minister, but I have heard you pray to the rain.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘I’ve heard you say, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.” That was when you and I and Reginald and Gaveston Murphy were to go walking in Northern Province.’

‘That was just a joke, just a bit of superstition. It didn’t mean anything.’

‘Nevertheless, you wanted it to stop raining. And now you want this thing to stop. Perhaps you ought to try a bit of superstition, as you call it. You certainly ought to try a bit of something. But,’ added Wahab, ‘don’t listen to me. I’m just an ignorant boy and a foolish boy and a facetious boy.’

‘Also a nice boy,’ smiled the Prime Minister. ‘I think I’ll try and get some sleep now.’

‘You don’t want me to stay?’

‘No, I want to sleep. Perhaps I’ll dream of the solution to all our problems.’

‘You’re a great one for dreams,’ said Abdul Wahab acutely. He kissed his finger-tips and shut his master’s eyes with them. Then, before leaving the chamber, he put out the light and his tongue.

In the darkness the lantern-lecture began again.
‘Here,’ said the voice, ‘we see a fine specimen of a diet riot, all the way from yellow Mozambique. The ricestore at Chovica was raided, with what results you here see. Black man’s blood, red as your own. And now comes starvation in Northern Rhodesia, broken men at Broken Hill, Kabulwebulwe a lament in itself. Finally, for a
bonne bouche
, cannibalism in – guess where? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. In Banff, Alberta. Incredible, isn’t it? A very small carcase, as you see, a boy’s rabbitbody. A few good stews out of that, though, and there’s one lad who’ll never go hungry again.’

Two

T
RISTRAM
was much thinner and he had a beard, very wiry. He had long been transferred from the Franklyn Road Temporary Detention Centre to the formidable Metropolitan Institute of Correction (Male) at Pentonville, growing there – with his beard – daily more truculent, frequently gorilla-shaking the bars of his cage, sullenly scratching scabrous graffiti on the walls, snarling at the warders, a changed man. He wished Joscelyne were there and also that pretty boy Wiltshire: he would give them what for and think nothing of it. And as for Derek – A delirium of gouged-out eyeballs, castration with a bread – knife and other pretty fancies passed much of Tristram’s waking time. Tristram’s cell-mate was a veteran criminal of about sixty – pickpocket, forger, peterman – a man of grey dignity who smelled musty.
‘If,’ he said to Tristram this October dawn, ‘if I’d had the benefit of book-learning like yourself, there’s no knowing to what heights I mightn’t have reached.’ Tristram shook the bars and snarled. His cell-mate placidly went on mending his upper denture with a bit of putty he had swiped from one of the workshops. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘despite the pleasure of your company this month and more, I can’t say as how I shall be sorry to leave, especially as the weather looks to be keeping up a bit longer. Though without a doubt I shall be renewing the privilege of your acquaintance in the not too distant future.’

‘Look, Mr Nesbit,’ said Tristram, turning from the bars. ‘For the last time. Please. It would be a service not only to me but to the entire community. Get him. Do him in. You’ve got his address’

‘Speaking for the last time myself, Mr Foxe, on this particular matter, I repeat again that I am in the criminal profession for gain and not for the pleasure of private vendettas or the like. In murder of the revengeful kind there is no money. Much as I’d like to oblige a friend, which I presume to consider that you are, it would go very much against my principles.’

‘That’s your last word?’

‘Regretfully, Mr Foxe, as I have to say it, I have to definitely say it.’

‘Well, then, Mr Nesbit, you’re an unfeeling bastard.’

‘Tut, Mr Foxe, such words is unseemly. You’re a young man and still have your way to make so you won’t resent a last bit of advice from an old codger like myself. Which is, to keep self-control. Without selfcontrol you will achieve nothing. With self-control and
keeping all personal feeling out of things allied to your book-learning, that way you should go far.’ He thumbed the putty which wedded teeth to plastic palate and, seemingly satisfied, inserted the denture in his mouth. ‘Better,’ he said. ‘That should serve. Always keep a smart appearance is my advice to young aspirants. As it might be yourself.’

The clanking of keys approached. A hatchet-faced pigeon-chested warder in worn blue opened the cell door. ‘Right,’ he said to Mr Nesbit, ‘out, you.’ Mr Nesbit got up from his plank-bunk, sighing.

‘Where’s bloody breakfast?’ snarled Tristram. ‘Breakfast is bloody late.’

‘Breakfast is done away with,’ said the warder, ‘as from this morning.’

‘That’s bloody unfair,’ shouted Tristram. ‘That’s bloody monstrous. I demand to see the bloody Governor.’

‘I’ve told you before,’ said the warder sternly. ‘Keep a clean tongue in your head or things’ll be made really hot for you, they will that.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Nesbit, extending a courtly hand, ‘I take my leave, hoping for a resumption of a very pleasant acquaintanceship.’

‘He talks proper, he does,’ said the warder. ‘You and your type’d do better to take example by him than go on blinding and bloodying all the time.’ And he led Mr Nesbit out, clanging the door shut afterwards, grinding the key like a rebuke. Tristram took his iron spoon and savagely hacked a filthy word on the wall.