The Wanting Seed (15 page)

‘Him,’ pointed the warder. ‘His name’s on this bit of paper. See – A. T. Bayley. You, Mister Swearer, have got to stay here. We’ll find another pal for you, don’t worry. Come on, old man,’ he said gently to
the Blessed Ambrose. ‘You’ve got to get out there and report for orders to some bloke in Lambeth who’s going to tell you what to do. Come on, now.’ And he shook him somewhat roughly.

‘Let me have his rations,’ begged Tristram, still on his knees. ‘That’s the least you can do, damn and blast your eyes. I’m bloody starving, blast it, man.’

‘We’re all starving,’ snarled the warder, ‘and some of us have to work and not just lounge about all day. We’re all trying to live on these here nuts and a couple of drops of this here synthelac, and they reckon those can’t last much longer, things being the way they are. Do come on,’ he said, shaking away at the Blessed Ambrose. But the Blessed Ambrose lay bright-eyed in a holy trance, hardly moving.

‘Food,’ grumbled Tristram, getting up with difficulty. ‘Food, food, food.’

‘I’ll give you food,’ scolded the warder, not meaning that at all. ‘I’ll send in one of these man-eaters as have been picked up, that’s what I’ll do. That’s who your new cell-pal will be, one of those. He’ll have your liver out, that he will, and cook it and eat it.’

‘Cooked or raw,’ moaned Tristram, ‘makes no difference. Give it me, give it me.’

‘Aaargh, you,’ sneered the warder in disgust. ‘Come on now, old man,’ he said to the Blessed Ambrose in growing disquiet. ‘Get up now, like a good fellow. You’re going out. Out, out, out,’ he went like a dog.

The Blessed Ambrose rose very shakily, leaning on the warder.
‘Quia peccavi nimis,’
he wavered in a senile voice. Then he collapsed clumsily. The warder said, ‘You look to me to be in a pretty bad way, you do that.’ He hunkered, frowning over him as if he were a stopped-up drain.
‘Quoniam adhuc,’
mumbled out of the Blessed Ambrose, supine on the flags.

Tristram, thinking he saw his chance, fell on to the warder, like, as he thought, a tower. The two rolled and panted all over the Blessed Ambrose. ‘You would, would you, Mister Nasty?’ growled the warder. The Blessed Ambrose Bayley moaned as the Blessed Margaret Clitheroe must, pressed by hundredweights, have, at York in 1586, moaned. ‘You’ve done for yourself good and proper now,’ gasped the warder, kneeling on Tristram and pounding him with his two fists. ‘You’ve asked for this, you have, Mister Treacherous. You’ll never get out of here alive, that you won’t.’ He cracked him on the mouth viciously, breaking his dentures. ‘You’ve had this coming a long time, you have.’ Tristram lay still, breathing desperately. The warder began, still panting, to drag the Blessed Ambrose Bayley to freedom.
‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,’
went this unfrocked man, banging his own chest thrice.

Eight

‘G
LORY
be to God,’ ejaculated Shonny. ‘Mavis, come and see who’s here. Llewelyn, Dymphna. Quick, quick, the
lot of you.’ For who should have walked into the house but Father Shackel, seedsman by trade who, many months before, had been taken off by lipsticked brutal greyboys. Father Shackel was in his early forties, with a very round cropped head, pronounced exophthalmia, and chronic rhinitis caused by a one-sided bulge on the septum. His ever-open mouth and wide eyes gave him a look of William Blake seeing fairies. He raised his right hand now in blessing.

‘You’re very thin,’ said Mavis.

‘Did you get tortured?’ asked Llewelyn and Dymphna.

‘When did they let you out?’ cried Shonny.

‘What I’d like most of all,’ said Father Shackel, ‘is a drink of something.’ His speech was muffled and denasalized, as with an everlasting cold.

‘There’s a tiny drop of plum wine,’ said Shonny, ‘left over from the labour and the celebration of the end of the labour.’ He rushed to get it.

‘Labour? What labour is he talking about?’ asked Father Shackel, sitting down.

‘My sister,’ said Mavis. ‘She had twins the other day. You have a christening job to do, Father.’

‘Thank you, Shonny.’ Father Shackel took the halffilled glass. ‘Well,’ he said, having sipped, ‘there are some queer things going on, aren’t there?’

‘When did they let you out?’ Shonny asked again.

‘Three days ago. Since then I’ve been in Liverpool. Incredible, but the whole hierarchy’s at large – archbishops, bishops, the lot. We can drop the disguise now. We can even wear clerical dress if we wish to.’

‘We don’t seem to get any news,’ said Mavis. ‘Just talk, talk, talk these days – exhortation, propaganda-
but we hear rumours, don’t we, Shonny?’

‘Cannibalism,’ said Shonny. ‘Human sacrifice. We hear about those things.’

‘This is very good wine,’ said Father Shackel. ‘I suppose one of these days we’ll be seeing the ban taken off viticulture.’

‘What’s viticulture, Dad?’ asked Llewelyn. ‘Is it the same as human sacrifice?’

‘You two,’ said Shonny, ‘can go back to holding poor old Bessie’s trotter. Kiss Father Shackel’s hands before you go.’

‘Father Shackel’s trotters,’ giggled Dymphna.

‘Enough of that now,’ warned Shonny, ‘or you’ll be receiving a clout on the earhole for yourself.’

‘Bessie’s a long time dying,’ grumbled Llewelyn with youth’s heartlessness. ‘Come on, Dymph.’ They kissed Father Shackel’s hands and went chattering out.

‘The position isn’t at all clear yet,’ said Father Shackel. ‘All we know is that everybody’s getting very scared. You can always tell. The Pope, apparently, is back in Rome. I saw the Archbishop of Liverpool with my own eyes. He’s been working, you know, poor man, as a bricklayer. Anyway, we kept the light going through the dark times. That’s what’s meant by a Church. It’s something to be proud of.’

‘And now what’s going to happen?’ asked Mavis.

‘We’re to return to our priestly duties. We’re to celebrate mass again – openly, legally.’

‘Glory be to God,’ said Shonny.

‘Oh, don’t think the State’s at all concerned with the glory of God,’ said Father Shackel. ‘The State’s scared of forces it doesn’t understand, that’s alL The leaders
of the State are suffering from an accession of superstitious fear, that’s what it is. They’ve done no good with their police, so now it’s the priests they call on. There aren’t any churches now, so we have to go up and down our allotted areas, feeding them all God instead of the law. Oh, it’s all very clever. I suppose sublimation is the big word: don’t eat your neighbour, eat God instead. We’re being used, that’s what it is. But in another sense, of course, we’re using. We’re right down to essential function now – the sacramental function. That’s one thing we’ve learnt: the Church can take in any heresy or unorthodoxy – including your harmless belief in the Second Coming – so long as it holds fast to essential function.’ He chuckled. ‘A surprising number of policemen are being eaten, I gather. God works in a mysterious way. Epicene flesh seems to have the greater succulence.’

‘How horrible,’ grimaced Mavis.

‘Oh yes, it’s horrible,’ grinned Father Shackel. ‘Look, I haven’t much time: I’ve got to get to Accrington tonight and I may have to walk: the buses don’t seem to be running. Have you got the communion wafers?’

‘Some of them,’ said Shonny. ‘The kids, God forgive them, found the packet and started eating them, blasphemous little heathens. They’d have wolfed the lot if I hadn’t caught them.’

‘A little job of baptism before you go,’ said Mavis.

‘Oh, yes.’ Father Shackel was led to the outhouse where Beatrice-Joanna lay with her twins. She looked thin but rosy. The twins slept. Shonny said:

‘And after the rites for the new-born, how about the rites for the dying?’.

‘This,’ said Mavis, introducing, ‘is Father Shackel.’

‘I’m not dying, am I?’ said Beatrice-Joanna in alarm. ‘I feel fine. Hungry, though.’

‘It’s poor old Bessie that’s dying, poor old lady,’ said Shonny. ‘I claim the same rights for her as for any Christian soul.’

‘A pig doesn’t have a soul,’ said Mavis.

‘Twins, eh?’ said Father Shackel. ‘Congratulations. Both are boys, are they? And what names have you chosen for them?’

‘Tristram for one,’ said Beatrice-Joanna promptly. ‘And Derek for the other.’

‘Can you give me water?’ asked Father Shackel of Mavis. ‘And also a little salt?’

Llewelyn and Dymphna came panting in. ‘Dad,’ cried Llewelyn, ‘Dad. It’s about Bessie.’

‘Gone at last, has she?’ said Shonny. ‘Poor faithful old girl. Uncomforted by the last rites, God have mercy on her.’

‘She’s not dead,’ cried Dymphna. ‘She’s eating.’

‘Eating?’ Shonny stared.

‘She’s standing up and eating,’ said Llewelyn. ‘We found some eggs in the henhouse and gave her those.’

‘Eggs?
Eggs?
Is everybody going mad, including myself?’

‘And those biscuits,’ said Dymphna. ‘Those round white ones in the cupboard. We couldn’t find anything else.’

Father Shackel laughed. He sat on the edge of Beatrice-Joanna’s bed in order to have his laugh out. He laughed at the mixture of feelings on Shonny’s face. ‘Never mind,’ he said at last, grinning imbecilically. ‘I’ll
find some bread on the road to Accrington. There’s bound to be bread somewhere.’

Nine

T
RISTRAM’S
new cell-mate was a massive Nigerian called Charlie Linklater. He was a friendly talkative man, with a mouth so large that it was a wonder he was able to attain any precision in his enunciation of the English vowel-sounds. Tristram tried frequently to count his teeth, which were his own and flashed often as in pride of the fact, and the total he arrived at seemed always in excess of the statutory thirty-two. This worried him. Charlie Linklater was serving an indefinite sentence for an indefinite crime that, as far as Tristram could make out, involved multiple progeniture along with beatingup of greyboys, flavoured with committing a nuisance in the vestibule of Government Building and eating meat when drunk. ‘A nice little rest in here,’ he said, ‘won’t do me no harm.’ His voice was rich crimsonpurple. Tristram felt thinner and weaker than ever in this polished blue-black meaty presence. ‘They talk about meat-eating,’ said Charlie Linklater in his lazy way, relaxed on his bunk, ‘but they don’t know the first thing about it, boy. Why, a good ten years ago I was keeping company with the wife of a man from Kaduna, same as myself. His name was George Daniel, and he was a meter-reader by trade. Well, he comes back unexpected and catches us at it. What could we do but
give him the old hatchet? You’d do the same, boy. Well, there we have this body – a good thirteen stone if he was a pound. What could we do but get the old stewpot going? Took us a week, that did, eating all the time. We buried the bones and nobody one bit the wiser. That was a big meal, brother, and a real good eat.’ He sighed, smacked his huge lips, and even belched in appreciative recollection.

‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ said Tristram. ‘There’s food in the outside world, isn’t there? Food.’ He drooled, shaking the bars but feebly. ‘I’ve got to eat, got to.’

‘Well,’ said Charlie Linklater, ‘for myself there’s no hurry right away to get out. One or two people are looking for me with the old hatchet and I reckon I’m as well off here as anywhere. For a little while, anyhow. But I’d be happy to oblige in any way I could to get you out of here. Not that I don’t like your company, you being a well-behaved and educated man and with good manners. But if it would oblige you to get out, then I’m the boy to assist you, boy.’

When the warder came along to shove the midday nutrition tablets and water between the bars, Tristram was interested to see that he carried a truncheon. ‘Any nonsense from you,’ said the warder, ‘and you’ll get a fine big crack with this gentleman’–he brandished it–‘on the soft part of your skull, Mister Bloody-minded. So watch out, that’s what I say.’

‘That black stick of his will come in very nice,’ said Charlie Linklater. ‘The way he speaks to you is not very good-mannered,’ he added. Then he devised a simple plan for securing Tristram’s release. It involved some
punitive danger to himself, but he was a man of big heart. Having consumed about nine stone of meter-reader in seven days, he was evidently also a man of steadiness and persistence. Now, in the first simple phase of his simple plan, he built up a show of enmity towards his cell-mate so that there should be no danger of the suspicion of complicity when the time came for the second phase. From now on, whenever the warder looked in through the bars, he would howl out loud at Tristram:

‘You stop getting on to me, boy. You keep them dirty words to yourself. I’m not used to being treated like that, nohow.’

‘At it again, is he?’ nodded the grim warder. ‘We’ll break his spirit, you just wait and see. We’ll have him grovelling before we’re through with him.’

Tristram, sunken-jawed because his dentures were broken, opened his mouth in a sort of fish-snarl. The warder snarled back, dentate, and went off. Charlie Linklater winked. Three days of this.

On the fourth day Tristram lay much as the Blessed Ambrose Bayley had lain – out, still, his eyes up to heaven. Charlie Linklater agitated the bars. ‘He’s dying. Come quick there. This boy here’s snuffing it. Come along now.’ The warder came grumbling. He saw the prostrate Tristram and ground open the cell-door. ‘Right,’ said Charlie Linklater, fifteen seconds after.

‘You just climb into his clothes, boy. Nice little job, this is,’ he said, swinging the truncheon by its leather-substitute loop. ‘Just you get into that man’s uniform, you two being much of a size.’ Between them they stripped the dead-out warder. ‘Pimply sort of a back he’s got,’
commented Charlie Linklater. Tenderly he lifted him on to Tristram’s bunk and covered him with Tristram’s blanket. Meanwhile, breathing hard with excitement, Tristram buttoned himself into worn warder’s blue. ‘Don’t forget his keys,’ said Charlie Linklater, ‘and more than that,, boy, don’t forget his truncheon. That’ll really get you places, that will, the little beauty. Now, I reckon he’ll be well out for another half an hour, so just take your time and act natural. Pull that cap well down over your eyes, boy. Pity about that beard.’

‘I’m grateful,’ said Tristram, his heart pumping like mad. ‘I really am.’