Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 8

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Freedom Coffee—came floating out into the street. Bradley paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.

He had walked several miles and his eczema sores were throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had skipped an evening at the Corporate Leisure Center to wander around half-lit streets. It was a rash act, since everybody knew the number of your attendances at the Center was carefully checked. In principle a Corporate employee had no free time, and were never alone except in bed. When not working, eating, or sleeping, it was assumed employees would be taking part in some kind of company-sponsored recreation. Anything else suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Ronspeak: #ownlove, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of his Department the balminess of the January air had tempted him. The sky was a deeper ochre than he had seen it all year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Center, the boring morale-boosting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by pot, had felt intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of Halifax, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among little known streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the losers.' The words kept coming back to him, a statement both of mystical truth and palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-colored slums to the north and west of what had once been Saint Patrick's Cathedral. He was walking down a potholed street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement. The darkened doors curiously reminded him of ratholes. Many of the potholes were puddles of filthy water here and there along the decayed road. He was forced to pause, gagging briefly from the stench of the sour water. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—brown-skinned girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps half of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Bradley; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with strong forearms folded across their tracksuit tops were talking outside a doorway. Bradley caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

'"Yeah," I said to her, "that's all very well," I said. "But you'd been in my place you'd of done the same. It's easy criticize," I said, "but you don't got the same problems as I got."'

'Oh,' said the other, 'I hear you. Loud and clear.'

The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; just a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The orange jumpsuit of the Corporate was not a common sight on a street like this. For Bradley, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I check your swipe-card, Colleague? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?'—and so on. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you. Instinctively, he looked up. He couldn't see one but there was probably a drone up there, passively tracking him. He ducked under the leafy canopy of a large old tree. Damn! Was his movement too sudden? Had he drawn attention—