But the sorting and packing was all done, and it was still early evening. He listened to the surrounding noises. He could hear the three distinct footfalls of his father, his mother and his sister, moving around, clearing away the supper things, restoring the furniture to its former positions.
I can’t stand the idea of spending the whole of this evening in their company. Is that bad? Does it make me an unnatural son? But Sis staring at me with goggling eyes as though measuring me for a coffin because she thinks that block Jamie is God this week and he says only people with suicidal tendencies refuse to dodge the draft—and Mom bravely keeping back the tears so that I feel any moment I’ll bust out snivelling too—and Pa … Well, if he says to me once more, “Son, I’m proud of you!” I think I’ll break his neck.
He took a deep breath and prepared to run the gauntlet.
“Where are you going? Surely you’re not going out on your last evening?”
Last evening. The condemned man ate a hearty supper.
“I’m going to wander around the neighbourhood for a bit, say goodbye to a few people. Won’t be long.”
And made it. Without half as much trouble as I expected.
He was so relieved, it was not until he actually stepped outside the building that he realised he had no clear idea of where he was bound. Stopping in his tracks, he looked about him, savouring the slightly salt freshness of the night breeze which promised to drive away the thin scattering of cloud veiling the sky.
So many things weren’t matching the pattern he’d subconsciously expected. Leaving home to be on his own for the first time, so he’d vaguely gathered from hints in novels and TV plays, he should have felt some kind of reinforced attachment to this his childhood home, sensed half-forgotten details stamping themselves on his mind. But a moment ago he’d been thinking that when he next returned he’d be dismayed at the size of his room, and now, out of doors, he was thinking the same as usuaclass="underline" that someone ought to clear all this litter from the roadway, paper, plastic, foil, cans, packs and packages; that it was more than time they repaired the gashed store-front cattycorner across the intersection, where “partisans” had looted a sporting-goods dealer for a supply of weapons; that in general this home of his left a lot to be desired.
Equally misty at the back of his mind had been the idea of a girl to keep him company on this last night before enlistment. He had seldom needed to go to special trouble since he was fifteen to find a shiggy, but his parents were of the older generation—like any parents—and while they had never objected to his staying away all night he had not yet plucked up courage to have a girl in and sleep with him. He had planned to make his declaration of masculinity tonight, when they would feel ashamed to complain. Yet here he was, on his own. All the girls he liked most had sheered off when they learned he was going to let the draft get his balls, and the shock of their unanimous rejection had so thrown him off his gyros he hadn’t managed to replace them yet.
Of course, there were places enough where he could be reasonably sure of picking up a shiggy, but that didn’t seem appropriate. If what he’d heard was to be relied on, he’d be doing a lot of that during his service, without the option.
No: he needed to call on someone he’d known for a length of time. He thought of his friends one by one, and came to the upsetting conclusion that there was virtually nobody he could trust not to say the same nauseating things as his family.
Except maybe …
He clenched his fists. There was one person he could be sure would not utter fulsome and revolting platitudes, whom he had not been to see since deciding he would accept his draft notice because he was unsure of his own ability to resist his persuasive counter-arguments. But now that it was too late to change his mind, it would be interesting, at least, to hear Arthur Golightly’s reaction.
* * *
Arthur lived, not in a block of apts, but in an early twentieth-century house that had long ago been subdivided to accommodate as many people as it had rooms. It was called “bachelor dwellings” but what it amounted to was a shabby tenement.
Nervously, Gerry pressed the ancient bell and announced himself over the intercom.
“Gerry! Come on up,” said a vaguely mechanical voice, and the door swung open.
He encountered Arthur on the first-story landing: a scruffy coloured man in his late thirties, wearing shorts and a pair of loafers. His beard blended without detectable margin into the mat of hair on his chest. Gerry wished the hair continued further down than his solar plexus; he was developing a wobbly pot-belly that could have done with some concealment. However, his display of it was of a piece with his rejection of conformity, and if you objected to that you objected to his total existence.
He was carrying a dish of something white and powdery with a spoon stuck in it, and had to move it from right to left before he could shake Gerry’s hand.
“Won’t keep you a moment,” he apologised. “But Bennie apparently didn’t eat anything yet today, and I think I ought to get some sugar down him for energy, if nothing else.”
He thrust open one of the doors giving on to the landing, and Gerry had a brief glimpse of a young man, in his middle twenties, stretched out on a chair and wearing even less than Arthur was. He shuddered and walked on to the other end of the landing, to wait outside Arthur’s door and try not to hear the coaxing words that drifted towards him.
Rotting. Just rotting. What kind of a life is that?
Then the Watch-&-Ward Inc. lock on the downstairs door clicked open to a key, and he saw a girl coming up the stairs: her face beautiful, her body shrouded in a street-cloak that reached below her knees. She was carrying a bag of groceries. On noticing him she gave him a mechanical smile and put her hand to Bennie’s door-handle.
She stopped while he was still digesting the air of residency she displayed.
“Does Bennie have someone with him?” she demanded.
“Uh—Arthur went in. Took some sugar.” Gerry swallowed hard.
“That’s all right then,” the girl said, and twirled off her cloak. Gerry’s breath stopped altogether for a while. Under the cloak she was wearing a Forlon&Morler housfit of a type which his sister had once tried to wear around the apt, only to have her parents put their feet down with shrieks of horror. It consisted of two long boots of red mesh, supported with a soft red cord around her waist, and that was that.
Bennie’s room opened and Arthur appeared. “Ah—Neek!” he said with relief. It sounded like “Neek”.
“Thanks,” the shiggy said. “But not necessary. I’ll get him to eat—he likes my cooking.”
“All yours, then,” Arthur said with a parodied bow. “You don’t know Gerry, do you? Gerry Lindt—Monique Delorne!”
The shiggy gave a preoccupied nod and vanished into Bennie’s room. Arthur dusted his hands and walked past Gerry to let him into his own.
“That’s under control,” he said with satisfaction. “Come on in—come on!”
Gerry complied with a backward glance, but Bennie’s door was shut fast.
Nothing had changed in the cramped space Arthur called home since his last visit, bar minor details. It was still in incredible chaos and the smell still suggested decay, as though the bric-à-brac constituted a domestic garbage pile. That was part of Arthur too, however; one could scarcely imagine him in any other setting.
For a moment he almost regretted coming. You couldn’t expect someone like Arthur to be properly appreciative of anyone else volunteering to defend his chosen way of life. And yet there was something so sickly about the approval expressed by people who were appreciative …