Ruins by Brian Aldiss (best novels to read txt) 📕

in sunlight. He in short trousers. Running in fear. But … at that crucial point, at the moment when his father struck the concrete path, had little Hugh Billing been running towards the disaster, or had he been running away? Memory always failed at that point. It was a source of torture. However many times he tried to recall what had happened, down came blankness, as if it were he who had died.

Dismissing his malaise, Billing continued to hum to himself. ‘She liked to swank a bit – to be frank, a bit too much … And so this coarse Hèlène was porcelain to touch …’

Then the possession of a son with successful records to his name had increased his mother’s … instability.

Of course, Billing’s sister June, now also part of that great blank, had been odd. Perhaps her wish to set the world, including her brother, severely, pedantically to rights, had derived from a fear of her mother’s pretensions. There was the early case of the biology exam question, ‘Describe the function of the leg in relation to the rest of the human body.’ To which young June had replied, ‘The question is incorrect, since a normal human body sustains two legs.’ Sustains. A nasty word. June had long sustained herself on such arid distinctions.

The lawyers, Messrs Grimsdale & Grimsdale, were friendly in their professional way, despite the fact that Billing entered their offices bearing an orange back-pack to which a miniature stars-and-stripes was sewn. They sat him at a table which had been polished every morning for eighty-five years, almost smiled and read his mother’s Will to him.

He uttered a cry similar to that of a hurdler who has jumped too close to the ultimate hurdle. All his mother’s money had gone to one Arthur Plumbley.

‘I don’t even know an Arthur Plumbley,’ Billing mumbled, bowing his head towards the shining surface of mahogany. So she did hate me after all. Now it’s proved beyond doubt. Mother – I! Your son, Hugh! Maybe she believed, or came to believe, that I jogged the ladder.

‘Arthur Plumbley was a friend of your mother’s,’ offered Mr Grimsdale Junior, in a tone of irreproachable seriousness. He had trained himself to have no gestures. The voice and the suit did it all for him. ‘He is blind.’ The pale hands rested.

Billing looked up. ‘Arthur Plumbley? Say, was he – is he a bald guy? Furry white tongue?’

‘He could be described as “a bald guy”, yes.’ Distasteful tone clearly implying he couldn’t. ‘He amused your mother in her last years.’ It was a sentence Billing tried in his dismay to commit to memory. There might be a song in it.

‘Shit,’ said Billing. ‘I met the old bastard at the funeral.’ He began to laugh. Like his mother, he had his areas of insincerity. Grimsdale Junior’s hands continued to rest, not unsympathetically.

Billing made his way towards Holborn Viaduct, dodging St Paul’s. The pavements were broken. Old men in fur hats gathered to complain and spit in the street. He bought a pair of Scholls insoles size ten from an Indian-run chemist’s shop. They had a tartan pattern. He went to a hotel to fit them into his worn shoes, then decided to have lunch there to cheer himself up.

‘One must stay personally happy if possible,’ he told Grimsdale Junior before leaving the lawyers’ offices. ‘My mother was not herself. It’s dreadful for me to look back now and realise that both my mother and my father – before he died, of course – were victims of a kind of undiagnosed compulsive madness.’

Grimsdale Junior did not understand that sort of talk. He replied in a firm voice, ‘The passing on of money is a serious matter, Mr Billing.’

‘I was talking of the passing on of genetic material,’ said Billing equally firmly, and became frightened by his own answer.

The waiters in the hotel restaurant were slack. Over curried parsnip soup, Billing watched the youngest and palest waiter loading red wine into a refrigerated display counter.

‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.

The palest waiter slightly altered his expression, perhaps to its fullest capacity, to indicate that he knew a daft question when he heard one.

‘We just put it in here.’

‘That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?’

‘Well, I was ordered to, like.’

‘By whom?’

‘The Filipinos, of course.’

Although the soup was quite good, Billing decided that neither London nor chilled red wine were for him; within twenty-four hours he was back in New York, flying standby. A violent shooting, with a man and a woman killed – one of them black, one white, for equality’s sake – had just taken place and Manhattan was in a tense mood. Billing went to the fourteenth floor of the building off Times Square where his music agency was sited. While he was collecting the latest royalties due to him on ‘Side Show’, he saw an old friend of his, Neil Epoxa (born Neil Caractacus in Beirut), in the outer office. Neil had been a successful singer. Now he was an unsuccessful singer, working in a night club up on the East Side. Once Epoxa and Billing had shared confidences – about sex partners, even about earnings. Never since had Billing been so rash with his secrets.

Still, he was glad to see Epoxa. The money Epoxa was collecting from the agency made him friendly towards Billing. He was high, too, as Billing discovered.

They took a cab to a large apartment building on Riverside Drive where Epoxa was living with an older woman whom he introduced as Laxmi. Laxmi was tawny and flat-chested and wore a tawny cord suit, supported by much jewellery. She kissed Epoxa, then Billing, thrusting a neat little tongue into his mouth. It was three in the afternoon. Tongue-time already? Billing wondered; he never understood how others lived. A party appeared to be in progress. People moved about the rooms galvanising themselves into youthful postures to loud music. The furniture, a sort of cream colour, had been bought on the previous day,