Fugue for a Darkening Island Read online

  DARKENING ISLAND

  by Christopher Priest

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  War has devastated the African continent. Millions of homeless, hungry refugees have fled to other lands. In England, as more and more Africans arrive and set up communities, normal life soon begins to disintegrate, with the entire population irrevocably factionalized into the Afrims and their supporters; the right-wing government and its supporters; and the ever-growing British civilian refugee group, ousted from its communities by the Afrims.

  Forced by violence to leave their home in London, Alan and Isobel Whitman attempt to drive to Bristol with their daughter, Sally, to seek shelter with relatives. But the car breaks down and the Whitmans find themselves at the mercy of roving bands from the various factions. Separated from and reunited with his family, forced to suffer from indignities and dangers, torn by loyalities and sympathies, Alan is unable to give his allegiance to any of the three warring groups until a final brutal decision is made for him.

  In this, his second novel, Christopher Priest dramatically explores the inevitable outcome of human prejudice and hatred. This is an engrossing, frightening and irresistible story.

  to friends

  First published in England under the title

  _Fugue for a Darkening Island_.

  DARKENING ISLAND. Copyright (c) 1972 by Christopher Priest. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 49 East 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 06-013407-0

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-181660

  I have white skin. Light brown hair. Blue eyes. I am tall: five feet, eleven inches. My mode of dress tends to the conservative: sports jackets, corduroy trousers, knitted ties. I wear spectacles for reading, though they are more an affectation than a necessity. I smoke cigarettes to a moderate amount. Sometimes I drink alcohol. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church; I do not have any objections to other people doing so. When I married my wife, I was in love with her. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I have no political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

  My skin is smudged with dirt. My hair is dry, salt-encrusted and itchy.

  I have blue eyes. I am tall: five feet, eleven inches. I am wearing now what I was wearing six months ago, and I smell abominably. I have lost my spectacles, and learned to live without them. I do not smoke at all most of the time, though when cigarettes are available I smoke them continually. I am able to get drunk about once a month. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church.

  When I last saw my wife, I was cursing her, though I have learned to regret it. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I do not think I have political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

  I met Lateef in a village ruined by an artillery bombardment. I disliked him the moment I saw him, and it was evidently reciprocated. After the first moments of caution, we ignored each other. I was looking for food in the village, knowing that as the bombardment had finished only recently it would not yet be in a totally plundered state. There were several houses still intact and I ignored these, knowing from experience that the groundtroops habitually ransacked these first. It was more fruitful to sift through the rubble of partially destroyed buildings.

  Working methodically, I had filled two haversacks with canned food by midday, and had stolen for future barter three road-maps from abandoned cars.

  I did not see the other man again during the morning.

  On the outskirts of the village I found a field which had evidently been cultivated at one time. In one corner I discovered a row of freshly-dug graves, each marked with a simple piece of wood upon which were stapled metal dog-tags bearing the name of the soldier. I looked at each of the names, and deduced that they were African troops.

  As that part of the field was the most secluded I sat down near the graves, and opened one of the cans. The food was odious: half-cooked and greasy. I ate it hungrily.

  Afterwards, I walked out to the wreck of the helicopter that had crashed near by. It was not likely to contain food, though if any instruments were recoverable they would be suitable for future exchanges. I needed a compass most of all, though it was not likely that the helicopter would have carried one that would be either easily detachable or portable. When I reached the wreck I saw that the man I had seen earlier was inside the smashed cockpit, working at the dashboard with a long-bladed knife in an attempt to remove an altimeter. When he became aware of my presence he straightened slowly, his hand moving towards a pocket. He turned to face me, and for several minutes we regarded each other carefully, each seeing in the other a man who responded to a situation in the same way as himself.

  We decided we would have to abandon our house in Southgate the day the barricade was erected at the end of our road. The decision was not implemented at once; for several days we thought we would be able to adjust to the new mode of life.

  I do not know who took the decision to erect the barricade. As we lived at the far end of the road, near to the edge of the playing-fields, we did not hear the noises in the night, but when Isobel took the car down the road to take Sally to school she returned almost at once with the news.

  It was the first concrete sign in our lives that irrevocable change was taking place in the country. Ours was not the first of such barricades, but there were few others in our particular neighbourhood.

  When Isobel told me about it I walked down to see it for myself. It did not appear to be very strongly constructed -- made mostly of wooden supports and barbed-wire loops -- but its symbolism was unmistakable. There were a few men standing around, and I nodded cautiously to them.

  The following day, we were at home when the noise of the eviction of the Martins disturbed us. The Martins lived almost opposite us. We had not had much to do with them, and since the Afrim landings had allowed them to keep to themselves. Vincent Martin worked as a research technician at an aircraftcomponents factory in Hatfield. His wife stayed at home, looking after their three children. They were West Indians.

  At the time of their eviction I had nothing to do with the Street Patrol which was responsible for it. Within a week, though, all men in the street had been enrolled, and every member of their families was given a pass-ticket which had to be carried at all times as identification. We saw the pass-tickets as potentially the most valuable possessions we had, as by this time we were no longer blind to the developments around us.

  Cars were allowed in and out of the street only at certain times, and the barricade-patrols enforced this rule with absolute inflexibility. As the street opened on to a main road which government regulations kept clear of all parked traffic after six in the evening, it meant that if you arrived home after the barricade had closed, you were required to find somewhere else to park the car. As most streets quickly followed our example and closed their entrances, the effect of this was that you were obliged to leave your car at some considerable distance from home, and walking the rest of the way at such a time was hazardous in the extreme.

  The normal strength of a Street patrol was two men, though on a few occasions this was doubled, and on the night before we finally decided to leave there were fourteen men. I was part of a patrol three times; sharing the duty with a different man each time. Our function was simple. While one man stayed at the barricade with the shotgun, the other walked up and down the Street four times. The positions were then reversed, and so on through the night.

  While I was at the ba
rricade, I was always most frightened of a police-car coming along. Although I did see their cars on many occasions, none of them ever stopped. During meetings of the Patrol committee, the question of what to do insuch an event was often raised, but no satisfactory answer, at least to my mind, was ever given.

  In practice, we and the police would leave each other alone, though one did hear stories of battles between the occupants of barricaded streets and riot-shielded police. No news of these ever appeared in the newspapers or on television, and the absence was more noticeable than the news itself would have been.

  The true purpose of the shotgun was to deter illegal squatters from attempting to enter our street, and secondarily to show as a form of protest that if the government and the armed forces were unable or unwilling to protect our homes then we would take the matter into our own hands. Such was the essence of what was printed on the backs of our pass-tickets, and was the unspoken creed of the men on the street patrol.

  For my own part, I was uneasy. The burnt-out shell of the Martins' house opposite ours was a constant reminder of the violence inherent in the patrols, and the never-ending parade of homeless shambling through the night past the barricades was disturbing in the extreme.

  The night the barricade on the next street fell, I was asleep. I had heard that the patrol was to be enlarged, but it was not my turn of duty.

  Our first awareness of the fighting was the firing of a shot nearby; while Isobel took Sally downstairs to shelter in the space beneath the staircase, I dressed hurriedly and went to join the patrol at the barricade.

  Here, the men of the street stared sullenly at the army lorries and police vans parked across the main road. About thirty armed soldiers faced us, evidently nervous and trigger-happy.

  Three water-cannons rumbled past, and disappeared through the jumble of parked vehicles towards the next street. From time to time we heard more shots, and the sound of voices raised angrily. Occasionally, the explosions were deeper and more powerful, and slowly a red glow brightened near by. More army lorries and police vans arrived, and the men inside ran towards the street. We at our barricade said nothing, only too aware of the flagrant provocation and absolute inadequacy that our solitary shotgun represented. It was kept fully loaded, but out of sight. At that time, I would not have liked to be the man in possession of it.

  We waited at the barricade all night, listening to the sounds of the battle only fifty yards away. As dawn came, the noise gradually lessened. We saw the bodies of several soldiers and policemen carried away, and many more wounded driven off in ambulances.

  As the full light of day came, nearly two hundred white people, some dressed in only their nightclothes, were escorted by the police towards a fleet of ambulances and lorries a mile away. As they passed our barricade, some of them tried to argue with us, but were herded on by the soldiers. While they passed, I looked at the men on our side of the barricade and wondered whether the hard lack of expression was also on my own face.

  We waited for the activity outside to die down, but the sound of gunfire continued spasmodically for many hours. We saw no normal traffic on the road, and assumed that it had of necessity been diverted. One of the men at our barricade was carrying a transistor radio, and we listened anxiously to each of the BBC's news-bulletins hoping to hear some word of reassurance.

  By ten o'clock it was apparent that events had levelled off. Most of the police vehicles had driven away, but the army was still around us. About once every five minutes there was a gunshot. A few houses in the next street were still burning, but there was no sign of the fires spreading.

  As soon as I could manage it I slipped away from the barricade, and walked back to my house.

  I found Isobel and Sally still sheltering under the stairs. Isobel had withdrawn almost entirely; she had lost all her colour, the pupils of her eyes were dilated and she slurred her speech when she spoke. Sally was no better.

  Their story was a garbled and incomplete recounting of a series of events they had experienced at second-hand: explosions, shouting voices, gunfire and the spreading crackle of burning wood . . . all heard as they lay in the dark.

  While I made them some tea and warmed up some food, I inspected the damage to the house.

  A petrol-bomb had exploded in the garden, setting fire to our shed. All the windows at the back had been broken, and lodged in the walls I found several bullets. Even as I stood in the back room a bullet flew through the window and missed me by a few inches.

  I crawled on my hands and knees to the window, and peered through.

  Our house normally commanded a view across the intervening gardens to the houses in the next street. As I knelt there, I saw that of them only about a half were still intact. Through the windows of some of these I could see several people moving. One man, a short Negro in filthy clothes, stood in the garden sheltering behind a part of a fence. It was he who had fired his gun at me. As I watched he fired again, this time at the house next to mine.

  When Isobel and Sally had dressed, we took the three suitcases we had packed the previous week and I put them in the car. While Isobel went through the house and systematically locked all interconnecting doors and cupboards, I collected our cash.

  Shortly afterwards, we drove down to the barricade. Here we were stopped by the other men.

  "Where do you think you're going, Whitman?" one of them asked me. It was Johnson, one of the men with whom I had shared a patrol three nights before.

  "We're leaving," I said. "We're going to Isobel's parents." Johnson reached in through the open window, turned off the ignition before I could stop him, and took the key.

  "Sorry," he said. "No one leaves. If we all ran out, the niggers'd be in like a flash."

  Several of the men had crowded round. By my side, I felt Isobel tense.

  Sally was in the back. I didn't care to think how this may be affecting her.

  "We can't stay here. Our house overlooks those others. It's only a matter of time before they come through the gardens."

  I saw several of the men glance at one another. Johnson, whose house wasn't on the same side as ours, said stubbornly: "We've got to stick together. It's our only hope."

  Isobel leaned over me and looked up at Johnson imploringly. "Please,"

  she said. "Have you thought of us? What about your own wife? Does she want to stay?"

  "It's only a matter of time," I said again. "You've seen the pattern in other places. Once the Afrims have got a street to themselves, they spread through the rest of the district in a few nights."

  "But we've got the law on our side," one of the other men said, nodding his head in the direction of the soldiers outside the barricade.

  "They're not on anyone's side. You might as well pull down the barricade. It's useless now."

  Johnson moved away from the car-window and went to speak to one of the other men. It was Nicholson, one of the leaders of the patrol committee. After a few seconds, Nicholson himself came over.

  "You're not leaving," he said finally. "No one's leaving. Get the car away from here and come back on barricade duty. It's all we can do."

  He tossed the ignition-key in, and it fell on Isobel's lap. She picked it up. I wound the window-handle and closed the window tightly.

  As I started the engine, I said to Isobel: "Do you want to chance it?"

  She looked at the men in front of us, and at the barbed-wire barricade, and at the armed soldiers beyond it. She said nothing.

  Behind us, Sally was crying. "I want to go home, Daddy," she said.

  I turned the car round and drove back slowly to our house. As we passed one of the other houses on the same side of the street as our own, we heard the sound of a woman screaming inside. I glanced at Isobel, and saw her close her eyes.

  I stopped the car by the house. It looked strangely normal. We sat in the car and made no move to get out. I left the engine running. To turn it off would have been too final.

  After a while I put the car into forward gear a
hd drove down to the end of the street, towards the recreation-field. When the barricade had been erected at the main-road end, only two strands of wire had been put across here, and it was normally unmanned. So it was now. There was no one around; like the rest of the street it was at once unnervingly normal and abnormal. I stopped the car, jumped out and pulled down the wire. Beyond it was a wooden fence, held in place by a row of stakes. I tried it with my hands, and found that it was firm but not immovable.

  I drove the car over the wire and stopped with the bumperbar touching the wooden fence. In first gear I pushed the fence, until it snapped and fell.

  In front of us the recreation-field was deserted. I drove across it, feeling the car lurch in and out of the ruts of the previous year's sport.

  I pulled myself out of the water and lay gasping for breath on the bank of the river. The physical shock of the cold water had exhausted me. Every part of my body ached and throbbed. I lay still.

  Five minutes later I stood up, then looked back across the water to where Isobel and Sally were waiting for me. I walked upstream, carrying the end of the rope I had towed behind me, until I was directly opposite them.

  Isobel was sitting on the soil of the bank, not watching me but staring blankly downstream. By her side, Sally stood attentively.

  I shouted instructions to them across the water. I saw Sally saying something to Isobel, and Isobel shaking her head. I stood impatiently, feeling my muscles shivering into the beginnings of cramp. I shouted again and Isobel stood up. Sally and she tied the end of the rope around their waists and across their chests in the manner I had shown them, then walked nervously to the edge of the water. In my impatience I may have pulled the rope too hard.

  In any event, just as they had reached the edge of the water they fell forward and began floundering in the shallows. Isobel could not swim and was afraid of drowning. I could see Sally struggling with her, trying to prevent her mother from crawling back on to the bank.

  Taking the initiative from both of them, I pulled the rope, towing them out into the centre of the river. Whenever Isobel's face came above the surface, she shouted and screamed in a mixture of fear and anger.