Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 2

As he put his hand to the door-knob Bradley saw he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH THE RONALD was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an incredibly stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colorless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.

'Oh, Colleague,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and-'

It was Mrs Chisholm, the wife of a neighbor on the same floor. 'Mrs' was a word considered 'customer-insensitive' by the Corporate—HR dictated you call everyone 'Colleague'—but Bradley couldn't help applying it to her. She was a woman of about thirty, but looked much older. He had the impression that there was grime in the creases of her face. Bradley followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Liberty Mansions were old apartments, built in 1980 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked from ceilings and walls, the pipes leaked frequently, cockroaches infested the walls, the air conditioning was usually running at half power when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be approved by remote video-conference committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.

'Of course it's only because Scott isn't home,' said Mrs Chisholm vaguely.

The Chisholms' apartment was bigger than Bradley's, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Sporting equipment—hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out—lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes. On the walls were blood-orange banners of the Ronald Youth Foundation and the Spy scouts, alongside a full-sized poster of The Ronald. There was the usual oily Big-R burger smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which—anyone could tell at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how—was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a Corporate-branded toy trumpet was trying to keep tune with the heavy metal music which was still issuing from the faceboogle.

'It's the children,' said Mrs Chisholm, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course-'

She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water. Bradley knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. Most of all, he hated the sight of stagnant water. He had to swallow hard not to gag. Mrs Chisholm looked on helplessly.

'Of course if Scott was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. Scott's good with his hands.'

Chisholm was Bradley's fellow-employee (his true "Colleague") at the Conspiracy Department. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of idiotic enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted deplorables on whom, more even than on the TRUTH Police, the stability of the Corporate depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Ronald Youth Foundation, and before graduating into the Youth Foundation he had managed to stay on in the Spy scouts for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Department he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Social Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing team-building exercises, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his trumpot, that he had put in an appearance at the Corporate Center every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of nervous sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind after he was gone.