Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 10

He woke up feeling he had slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only 20:30. He dozed for a while, then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below:

'He said, "Let's get out of this town.

Drive out of the city, away from the crowds".

I thought heaven can't help me now,

Nothing lasts forever, but this is gonna take me down'

The song seemed to have kept its popularity. You heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Firing Song. Marsha woke to the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.

'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some coffee. Damn! The thing's run down and the water's gone.' She picked the percolator up and shook it.

'We can get some from old Wentworth, I guess.'

'The weird thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have cooled a bit.'

Bradley also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:

'He's so tall and handsome as hell,

He's so bad but he does it so well;

And when we've had our very last kiss

My last request i-is...'

As he fastened the belt of his jumpsuit he strolled across to the window. The sun had gone down behind the houses. The flagstones were wet as though just washed, and he had the feeling the sky had been washed too, for once there was blue instead of sulfurous yellow between the rooftops. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Marsha had come to his side, together they gazed down with fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he observed the woman, her thick arms reaching up for the line, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. Despite being the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing and obesity induced by low-grade food, then hardened and roughened, she was beautiful. The solid, contourless body bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

'She's beautiful,' he murmured.

'She's a yard across the hips, easy,' said Marsha.

'That is her style of beauty,' said Bradley.

He held Marsha's waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. He was certain from their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on their subversion. The woman down there didn't care about that: she had strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the impossible blue, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the rooftops into the interminable distance. It was odd to realize the sky was the same for everybody, in Amerussia or Neochina as well as here. And the people under the sky were very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, billions of people just like this, ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay with the Losers! Why else did the Corporate disdain them so much? They were the soil to be ploughed, the air to be polluted. Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that must be Hillary's final message. The future belonged to the losers. Was he certain when their time came the world they built would not be as alien to him as the world of the Corporate? Yes, because at least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The losers were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at her figure in the yard below. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Corporate did not share and could not kill.