The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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Real china death-in!’
‘Miljardenondedjuu! We want them to look real, be real. What’s real for if you can’t use it, I ask? Now, out my way!’
‘What have they ever done to you?’ The mouth all slaving lotion. ‘What have they ever done?’
Boreas gestured, brushing away a fly or snail from his barricaves.
‘I’ll tell you something deep deep down, Ranceville … I’ve always hated dummies ever since china shop-rows of them stared in contempt at me as a poor small boy in the ruptured alleys off Place Roup. That’s how I began you know! Me a dirty slum boy, son of a Flemish peasant! Weren’t they the privileged, I thought, all beautifully dresden every day by lackeys, growing no baggy genitals, working or spinning clean out the question, glazed with superiority behind glass, made in god’s image more than we? Dimmies I called them to belittle them, dimmies, prissy inhibitionists! Now these shop-haunting horrors shall die for the benefit of mankind.’
‘Your box-official verdict, so!’ Gesture of a gaudy cross. ‘Okay, Nicholas, then I ask to ride with them, to belt in boldly in the red Banshee beside these innocent chinahands. They’re sinless, guiltless, cool – I’ll bleed to death with them, that’s all I ask!’
Open mouths gathered all round turned their stained suspicious teeth to ogle gleaning Boreas, who waited only the splittest second before he bayed from his mountain top
‘Get looted, Ranceville! You’re hipped! You think you can’t die – you’re like a drunkard sleeping in the ditch, drowning for ever because he didn’t realise there was a stream running over his pillow!’
‘So what, if the drinking water has drunks in it, okay, that proves its proof. How can I die the death if those dimmies are not alive?’
‘You’ll see how real a phoney death is!’
Now on the waiting road was silence while they chewed on it. Like workers who joined a continent’s coasts by forging a new railway, the unit stood frozen by their finished work, awaiting perhaps a cascade of photographs to commemorate their achievement of new possibilities: while behind them fashionably the unlined pink faces ignored them from the cars. The mouths came forward now, to see what Boreas would say, to hear out the logic, to try once again to puzzle out how death differed from sleep and sleep from waking, or how the spring sunlight felt when you weren’t there to dig it and flesh and china all one to me.
Boreas again was sweating on the heliport, in his blood the hard ticket of harm as he filmed the climax of The Unaimed Deadman, had the negro, Cassius Clay Robertson, fight to start up the engine of his little glass-windowed invalid carriage. And then the longshot of the white man in his suitable garb running impossibly fast with big gloved hands from behind the far deserted sheds, the black sheds with tarred asphalt sides, running over for the kill with mirth on his mouth. Now he could have real death again, had it offered, because the occasional man was hepped enough on art to die for it.
‘Okay, Ranceville, as long as you see this is the big oneway ride, we’ll draw up a waiver contract.’
Ranceville drew himself up thin. ‘I shan’t waver! As the Master says, we have abolished the one-ways. I believe in all alternatives. If you massacre innocents, you massacre me! Long live Charteris!’
The watching mouths drew apart from him. One pair of lips patted him on the shoulder and then stared at the hand Some sighed, some whispered. Boreas stood alone, bronze of his bare head shining. The invalid car had fired at last and was slowly lurching on the move. The white man with the terrible anger had reached it and was hammering on the glass, rocking it with his blows. They’d had a hovercamera in the cab with Robertson then, with another leeched outside the misting glass, and used for the final print shots from these two cameras alternately, giving a rocking rhythm, bursting in and out of Robertson’s terror-trance.
‘Get yourself in focus of the cameras!’ Boreas called huskily.
With a sign to show he had heard, Ranceville climbed into the old Banshee, a scrapped blue model they found in a yard by the Gare du Nord and had hurriedly repainted. Ranceville had red on clothes and hands as he squeezed in with the dummies. Their heads nodded graciously like British royalty in an arctic Wind.
‘Okay, then we’re ready to go!’ Boreas said. ‘Stations, everyone!’
He watched all his mouths like a hawk, the only one sane, whistling under his breath the theme from The Unaimed Deadman. Things would fall apart this time from the dead centre.
Marta was sprawling on the bed practically in tears and said, ‘You don’t understand, Angelina, I’d no wish to pot your joint out, but my loaf was nothing, not the leanest slice, and I was just a baby doldrums until the Father came along and woke all my other I’s and freeked me from my awful husband and my awful prixon home and all the non-looty things I try now to put outside the windrums.’
Angelina sat on the side of the bed without touching Marta. Her head hung down. Beyond, Charteris was holding a starve-in.
‘Fine, I sympathise with you when you stop whining. We’ve all had subsistence-living lives in rich places. But the way things are, he belongs to me you’ve got to get yourself another mankind. There’ll be a group-grope tonight – any grotesque grot they grapple – now that’s for you instead of all this ruin-haunting here!’
‘And supposing I pick on your Ruby you so despise! My life’s a ruin and the light dwindles on the loving couple. The Master said to me Arise –’
‘Rupture all that, daisy! You just don’t spark! Look, I know how you feel, the big love-feelings heart-high, but it wasn’t like that so don’t try to hippie out of it. All he did was walk in and make an offer as you sat single in your little house! That doesn’t mean he’s yours!’
‘You don’t understand. … It’s a religious thing and mauve and maureen webworks come from him binding me! With his sweet rocket it’s a sacrament.’
The ceiling simmering like a saucepan lid and Angelina hit her with a welp of rage and called her all mangey mother-suppurating things. ‘You Early Christian whore! Go throw yoursylph to other loins! He’s my man and stays that way!’
In anger, she drove the Marta from this ruined arena out, and then herself collapsed on to the single bed. There she still was when de Grand riled in, slipping a little packet to Case before he sought her out. She lay and let time set over her not unpleasureably, idly listening as the raucous noise of a song and plucked strings filtered in the shadow, wondering if anything mattered. That was the crux of it; they were all escaping from a state where the wrong things had mattered; but they were now in a state where nothing matters to us. At least if I can still thing this way I’m sane – but how to put it over to them and that they should be building. … The possibility exists, and some days he does build: almost by accident like a weaver bird adding an extra room for teenage chicks to creep up at the back where it stark and on the stares a big woman all all naked bottoms and beasts. … Bum weaver yes Colin he still has the glimpse. … A sort of genius and might stage a build-on. … Pull this lot together must make him listen maybe if I put it in a song for the Tonic all get the message. The table you use the table you take immense suck cess likely me running naked through loveburrow. … Old Mumma Goostale. …
As she dozed he entered, not uncivil with untrimmed moustache, de Grand, of secret history in plenty parishes.
‘Excuse you saw me interviewing for the film the Master. Second time I’m pleasure of drivnik-visiting.’
‘I’m thinking. I know it’s extinct. Blow!’
‘What intelligence! I’m full of aspiration. I left my own child to come on this quest to film the lootest Masterpiece.’
‘Bloody typical. Go back to your child, Paddy, marry her, bear lots of lovely morechild, marry them off, live humble, avoid oil-shares, stay away from the excitements of master-peace, rumpling upwards and rolling at speed towards the fluttering artnik.’
‘The director needs your