Futuretrack 5 Read online

  “Oh, no problem. The elderly Unnems are dying off like flies—only problem is sniffing out the bodies before they become a health hazard—we’re training dogs for that. The middle-aged are frightened to stir out of their houses, even for food. Epidemic of pneumonia last winter in Birmingham… and the number of suicides! Our main difficulty is pressure on the crematoria.”

  “And the young are as busy killing themselves as ever?”

  “The Futuretrack concept was a stroke of genius. Scott-Astbury again, of course. His illness is a… very sad business. Yes, the Futuretracks have skimmed off the bright and the bold—the potential leaders. And as Scott-Astbury reminded us, only one rat in twenty is a leader. Skim off the leaders into being Racers and Singers and Harlots, and you can drive the rest like sheep. In five years’ time we’ll have the remnant pinned inside London, Birmingham, and Manchester. Then it’ll just be a matter of time, like the Indian reservations of the Old American West.”

  “One almost begins to feel sorry for them.” “After what they did to British Coal and British Leyland? The Scargill strikes, the Bennites? No, Scott-Astbury had the answer to unemployment. Control men through their lusts. Give the Ests their idleness and silly dreams. Give the Techs their scientific rivalries and hates and envy. They won’t even bother to ask what’s happening in the world. There are still a few troublemakers left like old Kitson. But they’ll go the way of Idris Jones eventually… And give the Unnems their way with bikes and sex and drugs and music and fighting, and they’ll do the whole job for us… Hey, see that woman hanging out her washing under the sycamore tree, left of the corn stack? Well, her husband’s standing watching her boobs as she reaches up. We’re going to have a bit of courtship ritual there in a moment.”

  “Where, where? The corn stack, you say?” I punched the buttons of the Fenlistener at random, just to shut up their salacious voices.

  I knew now what Blocky knew, and I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to run, to scream, to smash. But I couldn’t. Any untypical behaviour would draw the eye of the inspectors. … So I got back to driving in posts for the notice board. Till the sweat ran down my face and blinded me. Till the sledgehammer sliced off the shredding top of a post and nearly crippled my left foot. I thought about Vanessa, still trying for her Sisterhood; George, still looking for a Champ to manage. The Blue-fish. Rog. All lost inside the contracting, squeezing worlds of the estates, like a scrap car in a metal-crusher.

  And Pete and Joan being used as breeding stock… At least killing people showed a certain respect…

  Eventually, the two inspectors passed me, going out. One nodded toward me.

  “Fine specimen, that. See his back muscles?”

  They’d never know how close they got to getting my sledgehammer through their elegant silver skulls.

  Meanwhile, I had to clown tonight, making people laugh. Tonight, the two inspectors would be watching.

  They’d come—were sitting at the front, on ornate Victorian chairs specially carried from one of the cottages. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I was glad of my top hat and false moustache: they helped to hide my hate.

  Now, the play was nearly over. It had been a wow. I’d excelled myself. Funny the ways hate can come out. Making the two swine laugh, tweaking the nerve ends of their Est-ish brains that I understood so well, was a kind of power that gave me a sad, black glee.

  The Black Prince of Paradise lay flat on his back, already slain by King George. Razzer had hit him such a thump I feared serious injury. Now Joan was entering, stately in blue, blond hair in plaits, the Prince’s mother.

  “What are your fees to cure my son?”

  “Five pounds, Mary. But you being a decent woman, I’ll only charge you ten.”

  “Well, cure him.”

  I bent over Pete and could have sworn he was really dead; but the hairs in his nostrils moved slightly.

  “Here, Prince, take three sips from this bottle. Now arise and fight your battle.”

  “Thou silly man, as green as grass, the dead man never stirs.”

  I waltzed round the stage in an agony of comic bewilderment. (Tweedledum nearly burst a seam of his riding mac.) “Oh, Mary, I took the right bottle off the wrong cork. I have another little bottle in my inside… outside… backside pocket, which will soon bring him back to life again.”

  The inspectors laughed again, hearty Est bellows that somehow drained the life out of the genuine giggles of the crowd. I gave Pete three more sips. He leaped up, turning a somersault, and whaled into Razzer like a man demented. My part over, I retired into the darkness, away from the growing bonfire, to give myself up entirely to hate.

  In came Beelzebub, played by fat, face-blackened Charlie Smith, another biker. He didn’t look much like Blocky’s painting of the devil.

  “On my shoulder I carry a club, in my hand a dripping pan And I reckon myself a jolly old man. I’ve just done six months in jail For making a whipcrack out of a mouse’s tail. …”

  My own position exactly. I needed the biggest whip-crack in the world, to beat the Ests from power. All I had was a mouse’s tail… one motorbike. Should I go back

  to Glasgow? Do a deal with Blocky’s devil? How much power would he give me, in exchange for my alleged immortal soul? Never enough. But Beelzebub was running on…

  “Early Monday morning, late on Saturday night, I saw, ten thousand miles away, a house just out of sight; The doors projected inward, the front was at the back, It stood alone, between two more, and the walls were whitewashed black.”

  Topsy-turvy illusion. Topsy-turvy illusion to fool and beat the Ests… but how?

  But here was Horse now, a horse’s skull held up on a stick, by Tommo with a blanket thrown over him. In the flickering firelight, Horse’s skull looked like death and hell itself. It reminded me, though, of the wooden horse of Troy… Tommo declaimed hollowly:

  “I’ve travelled to the land of Ikkerty-Pikkerty

  Where there’s neither land nor city,

  Houses thatched with pancakes, walls built with penny loaves, Little pigs with knives and forks in their backs Crying out who’ll eat me. …”

  That’s what we’d all become, in the hands of Scott-Astbury. Little pigs running about with knives and forks in their backs, crying out “Who’ll eat me.”

  The play ended. Mind still awhirl with half-grasped ideas, I stepped up to receive my share of applause. Applause out of all proportion, because there was a sudden electricity running through the crowd. Even the inspectors were infected, out of their cool appraisal, for a moment. Stepped forward, red-faced in the mounting firelight, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Well done, indeed. Never seen it done better. Come and do it for us at Cambridge… I’ll put an official invitation in the post first thing tomorrow.”

  Pete was shaking his head in disbelief; Joan clinging to him, almost screaming with delight.

  “Oh, Pete, Pete, Cambridge. You’ve always wanted Cambridge.” She put her head on his shoulder; she was crying. Pete saw me watching.

  “We’re going to Cambridge, Kit.”

  “That’s great,” I said; and I meant it. I’d seen a way to end the Scott-Astbury obscenity.

  Laura was in Cambridge.

  I was going to destroy Laura.

  But the evening was moving on past me. The props, the frail little proscenium, had been swept away. The bonfire was being stoked higher. The crowd was spreading out, forming huge circles, alternately man and woman. Handing round the open bottles of rich red wine that were the special gift of the inspectors…

  Beginning the dance of harvest home, the celebration of fertility, that went back… how long? To the time when there weren’t even fields, when the Fenland was a silent dark pool and mere, plash of fish and croak of heron?

  Or a mere thirty years, to the time when it was spawned out of the metal wires of Laura?

  Keri grabbed my hand. Gave me a bottle to drink from. I wanted to refuse, but the inspectors were watching…

  “Kit, y
ou were smashing tonight. You really made them laugh their socks off. C’mon, I’ll jump through the fire with you.”

  I went—because I didn’t want her jumping through the fire with anybody else. We joined the inner circle with Pete and Joan—unmarried men and maidens and young, childless couples. I felt the eyes of the inspectors watching, assessing the dance as it took shape with tentative shufflings and little flurries of movement. No doubt the inspectors were analyzing, tapping the buttons of handheld computers in their deep pockets. Like inspectors all over the Fenland tonight. Assessing the urge to be fertile, to multiply and cover the land. The meek inheriting the earth.

  When all the Unnem were dead…

  The circles began to move—impossible not to move with them. My arms and legs and finally my guts took fire, and for a while I forgot about the inspectors.

  After Keri and I had leaped through the highest part of the fire, we ran out of the circle, people beating out the flames on our clothes and touching us, crying meaningless shouts of praise at us, as if we were gods. We ran up the village street, so empty and glowing red from the fire we hardly knew it. The wind was cool on our bodies as we ran; cool after the flames. We ran up the old brick path to our railway carriage; Keri scrabbling in her haste to fit the key into the lock.

  “Don’t light the lamp.” She drew back the curtains and the distant red of the bonfire leaped into the room, changing everything, making me stand quite still in the shadows.

  Rustlings. Then Keri walked to the window and looked back at the fire for a moment, and I saw from her silhouette that she was naked. She turned, and the light of the fire cupped and stroked the fullness of her breasts.

  “Kit,” she said, like she’d never said it before.

  “No,” I said. I was not a breeding bull. Beyond the red night I could see a grey morning. No son would come out of me to splatter his young life over the front of a robo-truck; or journey into the dark in a psychopter’s pods. Or be exported to breed in Caithness or Cornwall, by a routine order tapped out by a computer. “No.”

  “Yes, Kit, yes. Or I’m going back to the fire to find somebody else.” She walked straight up to me and kissed me. She was crying; her tears ran down my face.

  As she bore me down on the bed, I cursed the fact that I was human.

  Chapter 20

  I was wakened by Keri leaving the bed swiftly. Opened my eyes just in time to see her naked shoulders flashing out through the hut door, into the early-morning sunshine. Then the door banged shut again, leaving me in the curtained dark.

  I turned over, irritated: that was the third time this week. What on earth was she up to, walking about outside stark naked? Our hut was pretty private, hidden from the road, and it was only 5 a.m. But Fenmen are early risers… and there was a good old Fenland chamber pot with rosebuds under the bed.

  Protectiveness and jealousy jolted me wide awake, far earlier than I liked. I got up to follow her. But something made me open the door cautiously, only a crack.

  She was crouching, just outside, over a faded blue polythene bucket. I admired for the hundredth time the silky beauty of her back, the deep smooth groove where the tiny bumps of her spine just showed under the skin.

  Until her back heaved, and I heard the sound of retching. I closed the door silently, not to disturb her. If she knew I’d seen her like that, she’d never forgive me.

  I went back to bed, wondering what she’d eaten. Joan kept a clean kitchen… the ever-present flies? When she finally came back in, I pretended to be asleep. She paused in the darkness, just inside the door, listening, intently aware of me. It wasn’t easy, pretending to sleep. She’d heard me asleep; I’d never heard myself. I breathed heavily and sighed hopefully. Apparently the sighs convinced her. She relaxed a bit, began to move about. Then stopped again and whispered desperately to herself.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit!”

  I’d never heard such desperation. Couldn’t bear to listen, so I pretended to half waken. “What you doing? What time is it?” I tried to keep my voice ordinary, early-morning grumpy.

  She came back to bed abruptly. I pulled her close, partly to comfort her, partly to comfort myself. She pretended to cuddle in, but she was tense, stiff as a board. I could feel her trying to relax, and failing.

  Finally she threw herself out of my arms, rolling across the bed till she was on the very edge. I put out my hand, and ran it down the silken furrow of her spine. As I did, she broke into a sweat all over. Yet she was icy cold.

  “What’s the matter? You ill?”

  “I said, are you ill or something?” Panic made me savage.

  Silence. Silence till I could have hit her, for destroying our happiness. Then she said, “Oh, go back to sleep. I’m getting up. I’ve got things to do.” Her voice was a strange mixture of love and rage. Like she was my mother and worst enemy, all rolled in one.

  I listened with my back turned and my eyes tight shut while she got dressed. Her dressing sounded different from usual; I couldn’t work out how. Not till I heard Mitzi start up outside. Then I knew she’d dressed in her leathers. She hadn’t worn them for weeks.

  Oh, well, if it helped to work off her temper…

  But the burst of acceleration as the bike shot off down the path made me shudder. Bits of crumbled brick showered against the wooden wall of the hut.

  The noise of Mitzi whined off westward. Keri made her howl like a string of obscenities.

  Illogically, I fell asleep again.

  I was wakened by the heat of the climbing sun oozing into the hut. Ten o’clock. The heat always became unbearable by ten. Keri had been gone hours. I knew she hadn’t come back. I’d have recognised the sound of Mitzi even in my sleep.

  I hurried down to Pete’s, tucking in my shirt as I went. Even though it was hot and only September, it was autumn. Pete’s outdoor tomato plants were curling up their leaves as they died, exposing their clustered fruit to the ripening sun in a final ecstasy of abandonment. Joan was busy stripping her rows of broad beans down to the final pod, cutting the strings that held them to their canes and trampling leaves and stems into the earth with her wellies, to provide fertiliser for next year. Pete was up a ladder, pointing the bricks of his gable end before the sharp teeth of winter tore into them.

  It was a clear-up morning, a morning of endings. In the fields, every tractor stood silent. The fields were brown, bare and empty, except for the wintergreens, all the way to the horizon, where the towers of Ely Cathedral were lost in a dark blue mist that spoke of coming cold. The sense of things ending made me panicky, as I called up to Pete, “Can I borrow the Velocette? Keri’s taken Mitzi.”

  Pete looked down and considered, the autumn sun glinting on the bald patches under his ginger hair.

  “Yeah, help yourself. You not working today? Fred Johnson wants his harrow seeing to.”

  “In a bit.”

  Pete gave Joan a glance, over my head. But I didn’t want to tell even them; and they were too nice to ask me. I got the Velocette out and went through the complex fiddle of starting her. I knew they were watching me sympathetically, which only made things worse. Had Keri told Joan what was the matter? They’d been married awhile; they were experienced.

  The Velocette was a bitch; there’d been a heavy dew; the grass was still wet. Finally, she fired. At least I knew which way Keri had gone. In the Fens, she didn’t have much choice of roads… But after two miles I did come to a crossroads. Luckily there was a damp patch of mud on the corner, from the last heavy rains. Mitzi’s distinctive tires had cut right across it. She’d turned left for Sutton. Then I realised where she’d gone. Nine Mile Bank. Where we’d been happy that first day. She always went there, when she wanted to think. And indeed Mitzi was there, parked as usual by the third hawthorn bush.

  I smiled. I’d known she’d never harm Mitzi…

  Harm? What did I mean, harm? Suddenly dry-mouthed, I ran up the bank.

  She was sitting with her booted legs thrust down toward the rippling water
s of the drain. One gauntleted hand rested on her crash helmet beside her. Still as a statue; as if she’d been sitting there for a very long time; staring out over the Fen landscape. Or the cloudscape above. Probably the clouds; her face was wistful…

  “Keri?”

  She turned; wide, blank eyes full of sky. Then she pushed her hair back, and I could see where tears had cut channels down through the light brown road dust on her face.

  She said nothing. Her eyes remained remote; hostile now, as if my coming had robbed her of something.

  “Keri—are you ill?”

  “I’m pregnant.” She said it so flatly that at first I didn’t take it in.

  “But… but…”

  “But girls don’t get pregnant these days? You forget, mate, I was on Futuretrack Five when you caught me. Us girls didn’t need the Pill—we’re usually dead inside the month. I’m not your little friend from Futuretrack Six.”

  “But-but-but-but,” she mocked. “You sound like the bloody Velocette. But nothing. You’ve really done it, mate.” She turned away, back to the infinite Fen. “I was free when you found me. Now what do I do? Wait till I end up a Valium-sodden old cow on some estate?”

  “I love you, Keri.”

  “You love me now, ‘cause I’m free. Will you still love me when I’m up to my eyeballs in Valium?”

  “But if I’d let you go on racing, you’d be dead by now!

  “Yeah!”

  “What do you mean, yeah?”

  “Yeah, I know I would be dead. That was the best part—why I could enjoy every minute. On a bike, they can’t touch you. Before they can get their hands on you, you’re dead.”