pushchair and Henry held her up so she could look down at the river. It was a daily ritual. She gazed in silence and struggled a little when she’d had enough. Thousands walked in the same direction each morning. Henry rarely recognized a friend but if he did they walked together in silence.
The Ministry rose from a vast plain of pavement. The pushchair bumped over green wedges of weed. The stones were cracking and subsiding. Human refuse littered the plain. Vegetables, rotten and trodden down, cardboard boxes flattened into beds, the remains of fires and the carcasses of roasted dogs and cats, rusted tin, vomit, worn tires, animal excrement. An old dream of horizontal lines converging on the thrusting steel-and-glass perpendicular was now beyond recall.
The air above the fountain was gray with flies. Men and boys came there daily to squat on the wide concrete rim and defecate. In the distance, along one edge of the plain, several hundred men and women still slept. They were wrapped in striped, brightly colored blankets which in day time marked out shop space. From that group came the sound of a child crying, carried on the wind. No one stirred. “Why is that baby crying?” Marie shouted suddenly, and her own voice was lost in that big, miserable place. They hurried on, they were late. They were tiny, the only moving figures on the great expanse.
To save time Henry ran down the stairs to the basement with Marie in his arms. Even before he was through the swing doors someone was saying to him, “We like them to be on time.” He turned and set Marie down. The play-group leader rested her hand on Marie’s head. She was over six feet tall and emaciated, her eyes were sunk deep and broken blood vessels danced on her cheeks. When she spoke again she stretched her lips tightly around her teeth and rose on her toes. “And if you don’t mind… the subscriptions. Would you care to settle now?” Henry was three months behind. He promised to bring money the next day. She shrugged and took Marie’s hand. He watched them pass through a door and caught a glimpse of two black children in a violent embrace. The noise was shrill and deafening, and cut off dead when the door closed behind them.
When, thirty minutes later, Henry began to type the second letter of the morning, he could no longer remember the contents of the first. He worked from the long-hand scrawl of some higher official. When he came to the end of the fifteenth letter, shortly before lunch, he could not remember its beginning. And he did not care to move his eyes up the page to see. He carried the letters into a smaller office and gave them to someone without seeing who it was who took them. Henry returned to his desk, with only minutes now to waste before lunch. All the typists were smoking as they worked and the air was thick and sharp with smoke, not of this day alone but of ten thousand previous days and ten thousand days to come. There seemed no way forward. Henry lit a cigarette and waited.
He descended the sixteen floors to the basement and joined a long queue of parents, mostly mothers, who came in their lunch hour to see their children. It was a murmuring queue of supplicants. They came out of need not duty. They spoke to each other in soft voices of their children while the line shuffled towards the swing doors. Each child had to be signed for. The play-group leader stood by the doors, by her presence alone conveying a need for silence and order. The parents complied, and signed. Marie was waiting for him just beyond the doors, and when she saw him she raised two clenched fists above her head and made an innocent little dance. Henry signed and took her hand.
The sky had cleared and a sickly warmth rose from the flagstones. The vast plain teemed now like a colony of ants. Above it hung a pale sickle moon, clear against the blue sky. Marie climbed into the pushchair and Henry wheeled her through the crowds.
All those with something to sell crammed onto the plain and spread their goods on colored blankets. An old woman was selling half-used cakes of soap arranged across a bright yellow rug like precious stones. Marie chose a green piece the size and shape of a chicken’s egg. Henry bargained with the woman and brought her down to half her first price. As they exchanged money for soap she made a show of scowls and Marie recoiled from her in surprise. The old woman smiled, she reached into her bag and brought out a small present. But Marie climbed back into her pushchair and would not take it. “Go away,” Marie shouted at the old woman. “Go away.” They walked on. Henry headed for a far corner of the plain where there was space to sit and eat lunch. He made a wide detour around the fountain, on the rim of which men perched like featherless birds.
They sat on a parapet which ran along one side of the plain and ate bread and cheese. Below them stretched the deserted buildings of Whitehall. Henry asked Marie questions about the play-group. There were rumors of indoctrination but his questions were casual and unpressing. “What did you play with today?”
She told him excitedly of a game with water and a boy who had cried, a boy who always cried. He took from his pocket a small treat, cold, bright yellow, mysteriously curved and laid it in her hands.
“What is it, Henry?”
“It’s a banana. You can eat it.” He showed her how to peel the skin away, and told her how they grew in bunches in a far-off country. Later he asked, “Did the lady read you a story, Marie?”
She turned and stared over the parapet. “Yes,” she said after a while.
“What was it about?”
She giggled. “It was about bananas… bananas… bananas.”
They began the half-mile walk back to the Ministry and Marie chanted her new word quietly to herself.
Far ahead the crowd was collecting around a point of interest. Some people were running past them to join it and were forming a circle around a compulsive beat, around a man with a drum. By the time Henry and Marie arrived the circle was ten deep and the cries of the man were muffled. Henry lifted Marie onto his shoulders and pushed deeper into the crowd. By his clothes the people recognized him as a Ministry worker and indifferently stood aside. Now it was possible to see. In the center of the ring was a squat, black oil drum. Animal skin was stretched over one end and the man beside it, a man the size of a great lumbering bear, banged it with his bare fist. Sacking doused in red paint wound around his body like a toga. His hair was red and coarse and reached almost to his waist. The hair on his bare arms was thick and matted like animal fur. Even his eyes were red.
He was not shouting words. With each pulse of the drum he gave out a deep loud growl. He was watching something closely in the crowd and Henry, following his eyeline, saw a large rusty tin passing from hand to hand and heard the clink of coins. Then he saw in the crowd a dull flash of reflected sunlight. It was a long sword, slightly curved with an ornamental handle. The crowd reached out to hold it, touch it, assure themselves of its substantiality. It moved in countermotion to the biscuit tin. Marie tugged at Henry’s ear and demanded explanations. He pushed deeper towards the circle till they were second from the front. The tin came close. Henry felt the man’s fierce red eyes on him and threw in three small coins. The man beat the drum and roared and the tin passed on.
Marie shivered on Henry’s shoulders, and he stroked her bare knees for comfort. Suddenly the man broke into words, a crude chant on two notes. His words were ponderous and slurred. Henry made them out, and at the same time saw the girl for the first time. “Without blood… without blood… without blood…” She was standing far to one side, a girl of about sixteen, naked from the waist up and barefoot. She stood perfectly still, hands at her sides, feet together, staring at the ground a few feet in front of her. Her hair too was red, but fine and cropped short. Around her waist she wore a piece of sacking. She was so pale it was quite possible to believe that she was without blood.
Now the drum took on a steady, arterial pulse and the sword was returned to the man. He held it high above his head and glowered at the crowd. Someone from the crowd brought him the biscuit tin. He peered inside and shook his great head. The tin was returned to the crowd and the drumbeat accelerated. “Without blood,” the man shouted. “Through her belly, out her back, without blood.” The tin appeared in his hands again, and again he refused it. The crowd was desperate. Those at the back pushed forward to throw in money, those who had given shouted at those who had not. Quarrels broke out, but the tin was filling. When it returned the third time it was accepted and the crowd sighed with relief. The drumbeat ceased.
By a movement of his head the man ordered the girl, surely his daughter, into the center of the circle. She stood with the oil drum between her and her father. Henry saw her legs shaking. The crowd was silent, anxious to miss nothing. The cries of vendors reached them across the plain as though from another world. Marie shouted out suddenly, her voice thin with fear, “What’s she going to do?” Henry shushed her, the man was putting the sword into his daughter’s hands. He did not take his eyes off her and she seemed powerless to look anywhere but into his face. He hissed something in her ear and she raised the point of the sword to her belly. Her father bent down and
