Tales of Disturbance

The Fox and the Starlight

He he has walked too far tonight. There are curfews now. Whispers on street corners. Something dark and nameless, brimming beyond the horizon. It may even be illegal by now - this walking at night. He should turn back. Perhaps he could still make it home without trouble. Also there's his ration at home, two beef sausages wrapped in newspaper. His tummy begins to rumble a little at the thought and he looks around to get his bearings. But there's nothing he recognizes. Only concrete anonymity under a dark sky. He has no idea where he is. He feels tired, worn to the bone. Unwell even. A sting behind his eyes, a growing headache. Not enough clothes to beat the darkling wind blowing, blowing, cold and troubled. The whole world is an orphan. The whole world is inadequately dressed in government clothes, fearing fearing the future. 

Suddenly his eye catches something. Movement. The swish of a plume that is a sudden tail across a path, tawny even in the mist and the twilight. A cat? No, fox. The movement is alarming in the stillness, but it is only a creature not a soldier. The fox looks back at him as if communicating. Then carries on, quicker now, some new momentum at work. It is just a fox, but it sparks something in him - some new clarity or urgency. Curfew or no curfew, he cannot go home now. It seems to wait for him, its eyes two small amber planets, searching the darkness. Finally with decision, it takes off. He follows, as if in a dream, the toes of his badly made government shoes scrape like a child's, over the crumbling asphalt. He feels the cold now, the star-lit wind needling through his thin clothes. He pulls up his collar and holds it with one hand as he rushes on, almost tripping here and there. He follows it past the fields spread out like black water, past the stacks of abandoned apartments, past the blind wire-eyes of the burnt out traffic lights. The moon's bald head, bear and cold, is now in front of him like a terrible confrontation. This road has led into a housing estate, full of small windowed houses forgotten. Nobody there. 

The fox, tawny even in this deeper darkness, dips under hedges and fences, nettles and weeds. Broken bits of windscreen glass lying in the driveways. Long forgotten rubbish. Still he follows. 

Only last summer, he thinks, only months ago, there were small sandaled feet pedaling bicycles and kicking footballs. Small girls clasping dolls in their small pink fingers, running joyously towards the tinkle of an ice cream van. Voices of mothers ringing through the summer nights from the ends of garden paths, calling children home for supper. 

Now there is only silence and absence; the scuffle of a rat somewhere. The icy wind disturbs the long weeds in the overgrown gardens. Burnt out cars are memorials to the screams that ripped through the night - that dreadful night. The small, blank windows stare back in dark, heavy weariness, as if they have seen too much.

'You drag your life behind you like a net full of stones through the sea.' 

The sentence drops into his head from nowhere. It seems to have nothing to do with these people- what he has been thinking about. And yet perhaps it does.

Yet he considers that this is true. His life is a heavy thing. There are times he feels desperate. Perhaps these people, their desperation, their sorrow, lives with him, underneath the surface. Yes, he thinks. Undeniably this is part of it. 

What does he want - justice?  

Perhaps. Though it isn't this exactly. 

When he looks back on his life, he knows it will be one, long vacant night looking out of a rented attic window, the pylon and the sycamore tree hanging in the window frame like accusations. He thinks of the waste paper bin filling slowly beside him every night, until it is abundant with crumpled paper. His job - writing lies for the government - the only thing that keeps him technically alive - is one long, poisonous tentacle, sucking the pulp from his soul.

Most of the time he manages not to think. Not thinking is easy, he finds, more or less. 'Don't think' he sometimes tells himself in the middle of an article, 'don't think, don't think, don't think'. 

But this self command he knows is not sustainable and there are occasions that he wakes with a shudder at the lies he has told.

To be fair to himself, he thinks, he always begins with the truth. Like a sculptor with a pure white block of marble truth. 

And as the light drains from the sky behind the blackening pylon and the sycamore bows in the wind, he makes incision after incision, blow after blow. He censors and modifies, edits and selects: verb, adjective, quantifier, article as the fire spits in the grate and casts shadows around the bare walls of his wooden attic. Active or Passive? Neutral or relative? Definite or Indefinite? Past or present? He chooses the sentences that will ensure he can eat for another week. Buy shoes for the winter.  Yes, he hacks away at the truth until it is simply unrecognisable. 

He knows one misconstrued word could mean a caution, a dismissal, a prison sentence.

An execution.

So he bows and defers, ingratiates and placates the powers that be. And all the time he is completely untortured by his own conscience. This is surprising, he considers, even to himself. 

He only has himself to think about. Not a family. That was something. He was not like his colleague, Kilgraston.  Sometimes he thinks of Kilgraston. He has to admit, Kilgraston has made him think.

Kilgraston had gone on the run last year. The police had gone after him. This is because one quiet  Wednesday afternoon, Kilgraston had become a revolutionary. 

Suddenly, moved by something invisible, he had stood on his desk, holding up a photograph of a family. A smiling, happy family. He had immediately snapped on the loudspeaker:

'I have a question!' There was no reponse. Barely anyone even stopped working. 

'I have a question!' He had repeated, louder. 'What happened to them?' He had pointed at the photograph and swirled around so the whole office could see. 

Only a few heads turned in the crowded office. 

'What happened to the Fleister family? Georg Fleister, our friend who worked beside us? Where is he? What happened to him?'

A turning of heads, a shuffle. The man himself had put his head down, pretending to read his notes.

Suddenly Kilgraston's voice caught, his rage snagging on his tears.

'What happened to them, YOU BRUTES?!?' 

There was movement at that. The nearest guard who had seemed drugged and glossy eyed up to this moment, moved towards him and clumsily tried to drag him down from the desk.

Kilgraston kicked the guard in the face and still held on to the screeching microphone.

'Tyrants! All of you. MONSTERS! 

You tortured them, didn't you! You Murdered them. 

Admit it. Admit it, you cowards. COWARDS!' 

He spat at the guard. 

'Murdering children!' 

He pointed to a small boy in a turtleneck sweater smiling out from the centre of the image. 

'There's blood on your hands!' A scuffle as another guard had appeared and helped the first with difficulty, Kilgraston flailing and kicking.

'You'll pay for this, you COWARDS!' he had yelled again, even as the guards were finally dragging him off the desk,'You'll pay for what you've done!' 

The microphone cord had snapped then. Kilgraston who had managed to escape the guards by ducking out of his shirt, had run amok and topless through the rows of wooden desks, overturning computers, pushing piles of paper to the floor. The bewildered guards had chased, Kilgaston yelling still, waving the photograph. With a final movement, quick as a sprinter, he had somehow managed to escape out a window. The guard had taken a shot at him, and another. But the bullets had lodged into a stone wall. 

Kilgaston had got away.