The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ far end of the drapery tunnel is not the end of all things. A bizarre room without windows is situated there, all wood, all drawers, with things hanging. Too scary by half to enter. Take a right turn at a run and daylight gleams ahead. You can escape into the yard, and freedom.

      Or you can climb a mean flight of stone stairs, which rises just before you reach the yard door. At the top of these stairs, you come (but not very often) into a huge echoing room under a high pitched roof, its stresses held at bay by transverse metal bars. It is a vast room, like a hangar for light aircraft. Several people work here, on either side of a long battle-scarred table. Sewing machines whirr. They are presided over by a huge woman dressed for all eternity in red flannel, matching the flames in her face.

      ‘What do you want, boy?’

      ‘I came to see how you were getting on.’

      ‘Well, keep quiet, then.’ The kid’s the boss’s son, ain’t he?

      The red flannel terror has a gas ring burning by her side, guillotines being hard to come by in East Dereham. Things steam, pudding-like, but do not smell like puddings. Flat irons of antique brand and purpose heat over radiators. The denizens of this department are making felt and other hats and goodness’ knows what else. The red-faced Queen of the Inquisition has wooden heads which split in twain at the turn of a wooden screw. Pieces of material are strewn everywhere on the huge central table, as if laid for a banquet of cloth-eaters. The gas hisses. The pale-faced people stare, saying nothing. They have lived here for ever, their existence controlled by the huge terror in red. I turn to leave.

      ‘And shut the door behind you,’ yells the terror. She roars with laughter at what she mistakes for a joke.

      There is someone else in the aircraft hangar, a man, the only man. Father calls him ‘Perpsky’. Perpsky dresses in a pin-stripe suit snappier, darker than anyone else’s, and manages to wear the tape measure rather flashily round his neck. He is bald and cheerful. He likes to sit me on his knee and tickle me. Although I do not care for this, I am too polite to say so. Father tells me to stay away from Perpsky. Later, Perpsky leaves H. H. and sets up on his own as tailor and outfitter.

      So now you are in the yard, in the middle of the topographical tangle, with buildings all around, each devoted to different aspects of the retail trade. Removal vans come and go, the name ‘H. H. Aldiss’, complete with a curly underlining, large in mock-handwriting upon their sides.

      Here is a giant Scots pine, which you can see from the sitting-room windows. It grows outside Bill’s garage. The Rover is kept here, square and black, inside its house with mica windows. It sulks if not driven regularly and its batteries go ‘flat’, although I detect no change in their proportions. To start up the vehicle, Father produces a double-angled key, inserts it under the front bumper and with enormous effort produces a faint coughing from the engine – polite at first, then furious at being disturbed. Exciting blue poisonous gas fills the garage. I love the smell of it and inhale deeply. The car runs on Father’s favourite petrol, Pratt’s High Test.

      Behind the garage stands the engine room, where the shop’s electricity was once generated. Here is a huge brutal machine with pistons, levers and gauges, all unmoving and unmovable. It is silent now. Its day has come and gone: after the dinosaur, company electricity.

      The outside passage to the left of the engine house is narrow and threatening. On its other side is a slim-shouldered wooden door, set in a crumbling brick wall. Once the door was painted red. Now it is a sort of shabby rose, and flakes of old paint can be picked off with a fingernail. It has a funny wooden bobbin latch – all part of a bygone day we cannot decipher.

      Go through this door and here’s another puzzle from the past. A narrow lane with a gutter running down the middle, which ends in a brick wall; it is a little street leading back to Victorian times. To the left is a high brick wall, the wall marking the end of the drapery department. And to the right … a row of low, two-storey terraced cottages, three of them, with bobbins at each door. Creepy though it is, the brave can still enter the cottages, can even venture up stairs that creak horrendously as you go, to peer out of the tiny upper windows.

      Not only are the cottages almost certainly haunted, they are stuffed with ungainly goods. Black enamelled bedsteads, for instance, wrapped about with twisted straw, babies’ cots enclosed in sisal. Here too reposes a huge old wicker Bath chair with two yellowing tyred wheels. The cottages are now stores, demoted and outmoded.

      You creep away and come back to the yard. The yard is wider here, leading to the stables. On the right is the Factory, built, Norfolk-fashion, of knapped flints interspersed by rows of brick which mark its three storeys. Against the factory walls is my sandpit where I play. I build castles with tunnels sweeping through them. I use woodlice – ‘pigs’ – as the inhabitants of these fortifications. Sensing that they may not entirely enjoy this occupation, since I have woken them from cosy sleeps under stones, I make a vow to the woodlice that, if they will play with me, I will be kind to them for the rest of my life, and never kill a single one.

      Over sixty years, I have kept my vow. Indeed, a tribute to ‘pigs’ is paid in Helliconia Winter, where they are called rickybacks, a more friendly name than woodlice. Rickybacks survive for thousands of eons on Helliconia, as woodlice have done on Earth.

      There’s a fence opposite the Factory. Behind this fence is our garden. That is to say, Dot and Bill’s garden, some way distant from the flat, but much enjoyed by Dot. Father has bought her a summerhouse. It looks across the lawn towards the row of cottages.

      These old cottages were built for the live-in staff, not of H. H., but of his vanished predecessor. Conditions in those little rooms must have been primitive. The gutter in the middle of their lane indicates as much.

      Dot is fond of the garden and spends some time there, occasionally sighing and wishing she were as free as a bird. When her mother, Grandma Wilson, or Cousin Peggy comes to stay, we sit in the summerhouse. Grandma in still in her widow’s weeds, and remains that way until her death. I practise reading to her.

      Dot furnishes it as if it is her doll’s house. She subscribes to Amateur Gardening, which gives away colour prints of flowers, generally flowers flopping about in bowls and vases. At least once a month, one blossom is seen to have fallen from its bowl on to the surface of a highly polished table. Mother cuts these pictures out and frames them in passe-partout – words to which I am for a time addicted, learning the eccentric way in which they are spelt. Dot hangs her pictures in the summerhouse.

      My cousins and I are naughty. If The Guv’ner catches me, I get a yardstick across the back of my bare legs. Sometimes Bill gives me a more ceremonial whacking. I do not cry. What I most dislike is that afterwards he squats down to make me shake hands with him and announce that we are still friends.

      God also gets fed up with my naughtiness. As gods will, he devises more subtle tortures than any mere father can. In the garden stands a low-growing thorn tree. I rush into the garden one day, shrieking. Possibly I am three, a peak shrieking time. I find two of the yard dogs there, growling furiously. They have chased one of the yard cats into the thorn tree. The cat crouches on a branch, looking down at the dogs, just out of reach of their snapping jaws.

      My arrival startles the cat. It decides to make a run for it. Leaping from the tree, it has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it, baying with fury.

      Next moment – in the words of Handel’s Messiah, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery … we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ The cat is changed in the twinkling СКАЧАТЬ