When she went to lie on the sofa, her back to me, she was sulking. She was making use of me to check her impulse to step forward away from childhood into being a girl, a young girl with clothes and mannerisms and words regulated precisely to that condition.
Her conflict was great, and so her use of me was inordinate and tiresome, and it all went on for some weeks, while she complained that I criticised her appearance, and it was my fault she was going to have to spend money on clothes, and that she did or did not like how she looked — that she did not want to wear nothing but trousers and shirts and sweaters for the whole of her life, and wanted 'something decent to wear at last'; but that since my generation had made such a mess of everything, hers had nothing interesting to wear, people her age were left with ancient fashion magazines and dreams of the delicious and dead past… and so it went on, and on.
And now it wasn't only that she was older and her body showing it: she was putting on weight. She would lie all day on the sofa with her yellow dog-like cat, or cat-like dog, she would lie hugging him and petting him and stroking him, she would suck sweets and eat bread and jam and fondle the animal and daydream. Or she sat at the window making her sharp little comments, eating. Or she would supply herself with stacks of bread and jam, cake, apples, and arrange a scene in the middle of the floor with old books and magazines, lying face down with Hugo sprawled across the back of her thighs: there she would read and dream and eat her way through a whole morning, a whole day, days at a time.
It drove me quite wild with irritation: yet I could remember doing it myself.
Suddenly she would leap up and go to the mirror and cry out: 'Oh, dear, I'll be getting so fat you'll think I'm even more ugly than you do now!' Or: 'I won't be able to get into any clothes even when you do let me buy some new ones, I know you don't really want me to have new ones, you just say so, you think I'm being frivolous and heartless, when so many people can't even eat.'
I could only reiterate that I would be delighted if she bought herself some clothes. She could go to the secondhand markets and shops, as most people did. Or, if she liked, she could go to the real shops — just this once. For buying clothes or materials in the shops was by that time a status symbol; the shops were really used only by the administrating class, by — as most people called them, The Talkers. I knew she was attracted by the idea of actually going to a real shop. But she ignored the money I had left in a drawer for her, and went on eating and dreaming.
I was out a good deal, busy on that common occupation, gathering news. For while I had, like everyone else, a radio, while I was a member of a newspaper circle — shortage of newsprint made it necessary for groups of people to buy newspapers and journals in common and circulate them — I, like everyone else, looked for news, real news, where people congregated in the streets, in bars and pubs and teahouses. All over the city were these groups of people, moving from one place to another, pub to teahouse to bar to outside the shops that still sold television. These groups were like an additional organ burgeoning on the official organs of news: all the time new groups, or couples, or individuals added themselves to a scene, stood listening, mingling, offering what they themselves had heard — news having become a sort of currency — giving in exchange for rumour and gossip, gossip and rumour. Then we moved on, and stopped; moved on and stopped again, as if movement itself could allay the permanent unease we all felt. News gathered in this way was often common talk days or even weeks before it was given official life in the newscasts. Of course it was often inaccurate. But then all news is inaccurate. What people were trying to do, in their continual moving about and around, nosing out news, taking in information, was to isolate residues of truth in rumour, for there was nearly always that. We felt we had to have this precious residue: it was our due, our right. Having it made us feel safer and gave us identity. Not getting it, or enough of it, deprived us, made us anxious.
This is how we saw it then. Now I think something different: that what we were doing was talking. We talked. Just like those people above us who spent their lives in their eternal and interminable conferences, talking about what was happening, what should happen, what they fondly hoped they could make happen — but of course never did — we talked. We called them The Talkers… and ourselves spent hours of every day talking and listening to talk.
Mostly, of course, we wanted to know what was happening in the territories to the east and to the south — referred to as 'out there' or 'down there' — because we knew that what happened there would sooner or later affect us. We had to know what gangs were approaching, or rumoured to be approaching — gangs which, as I've said, were not all 'kids' and 'youngsters' now, were made up of every kind and age of person, were more and more tribes, were the new social unit; we had to know what shortages were expected or might be abating; if another suburb had decided entirely to turn its back on gas, electricity and oil and revert to candle power and ingenuity; if a new rubbish dump had been found, and if so, could ordinary people get access to its riches; where there were shops that might have hides or old blankets or rose hips for vitamin syrups, or recycled plastic objects, or metal things like sieves and saucepans, or whatever it was, whatever might be cast up from the dead time of plenty.
Of course, such contriving and patching and making do began to parallel our ordinary living, our affluence and waste and overeating, at a very early stage, long before the time of which I am writing now. We were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard.
Sometimes I left Emily — fearful, of course, for what might happen in my absence, but thinking the risk worth it — to make trips a good way out from the city, to villages, farms, other towns. These might take two or three days, since the trains and buses were so infrequent and unreliable, and the cars, nearly all of them used by officialdom, so reluctant to offer lifts because of the fear of ordinary people felt by the official class. I walked, having rediscovered the uses of my feet, like most people.
One day I returned to the flat and to Emily with half a dozen sheepskins. Other things as well, which I put away in cupboards and hiding places with supplies of all kinds for future and still only partly imagined contingencies, but it was the skins that were important, since they started her off on a new phase of her development. At first she pretended to ignore them. Then I saw her standing in front of a long mirror I had in the hall, or lobby, and she was pinning them on her. She seemed to be aiming at a savage-princess effect, but as soon as she knew I had noticed and was interested, she returned to her place on the sofa with Hugo, returned to her daydream which excluded the time we were in fact living through. Yet I believe she was intrigued by the business of survival, its resources and tricks and little contrivances. I remember that it was at that time she took pleasure in creating a dish of dumplings and gravy, using nothing but some old onions, withering potatoes and herbs, presenting it with a flourish like a chefs. She liked the markets where she tracked down things I would never have bothered myself with. She enjoyed — what I always found irritating and could not help contrasting with the simplicities and efficiencies of the past — building up the fire to heat water for washing and cooking. She scolded me for being prepared to use stocks of wood I had, and insisted on running out to some deserted building to bring back old skirting boards and suchlike, which she proceeded to split, using an axe skilfully then and there on the carpet, shielding this with old rags from even worse wear than it had suffered already. Yes, she was very handy, and this said everything about her experiences before she had come to me. And she knew I was watching and drawing my conclusions; and this sent her back to the sofa, for her need to be secret, her need not to be understood and found out was stronger, even now, than anything. Yet I was comforted, seeing her skills and her resources, and the heavy load of foreboding I carried about with me because of her future was lightened: how could this heavy, dreaming, erratic child, so absorbed in herself, in fantasy, in the past, survive what we would all have to survive? And I began to realise just how dark a foreboding it was, how I had come to watch and grieve over her, how sharp was my anxiety when she was out in empty buildings and waste lots. 'Why do you think I can't look after myself?' she cried, in a rage of irritation, though of course, being Emily and so instructed in the need to please, to placate, she smiled and tried to hide it: the real irritation, her real emotions, she must hide and dim, while her pretend angers and sulks, the adolescent's necessary play-acting, were on display all the time.