The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess Page B

audible joy. Purley, Croydon, Thornton Heath, Norwood. The police officers alighted.And now the train went purring into the deep black heart of the immemorial city. Dulwich, Camberwell, Central London. And soon Beatrice-Joanna was on the local line to the North-West Terminus.
    She was shocked at the number of grey and black police that infested the noisy station. She joined a queue in the booking-hall. Officers of both forces sat at long tables barring the way to the bank of booking-guichets. They were smart, pert, clipped.
    ‘Identity-card, please.’ She handed it over. ‘Destination?’
    ‘State Farm NW 313 , outside Preston.’
    ‘Purpose of trip?’
    She fell easily into the rhythm. ‘Social visit.’
    ‘Friends?’
    ‘Sister.’
    ‘I see. Sister.’ A dirty word, that. ‘Duration of visit?’
    ‘I can’t say. Look here, why do you want to know all this?’
    ‘Duration of visit?’
    ‘Oh, perhaps six months. Perhaps longer.’ How much should she tell them? ‘I’m leaving my husband, you see.’
    ‘Hm. Hm. Check on this passenger, will you?’ A constable-clerk copied from her identity-card on to a buff form, official. Meanwhile another young woman was in trouble. ‘I tell you I’m not pregnant,’ she kept saying. A gold-haired thin-lipped policewoman in black began to pull her to a door blazoned MEDICAL OFFICER. ‘We’ll soon see,’ she said. ‘We’ll soon know all about that, shan’t we, dear?’
    ‘But I’m not,’ cried the young woman. ‘I tell you I’m not.’
    ‘There,’ said Beatrice-Joanna’s interrogator, handing back her stamped carnet. He had a pleasant prefect’s face on which grimness sat like a bogey-mask. ‘Too many illeg pregs trying to escape to the provinces. You wouldn’t be trying anything like that, would you? Your card says you’ve got one child, a son. Where is he now?’
    ‘Dead.’
    ‘I see. I see. Well, that’s that then, isn’t it? Off you go.’ And Beatrice-Joanna went to book her single ticket to the north.
    Police at the barriers, police patrolling the platform. A crowded train (nuclear-propelled). Beatrice-Joanna sat down, already exhausted, between a thin man so stiff that his skin seemed to be armour and a very small woman whose legs dangled like a very big doll’s. Opposite was a check-suited man with a coarse comedian’s face, sucking desperately at a false molar. A small girl, open-mouthed as with adenoid growths, surveyed Beatrice-Joanna from head to foot, foot to head, in a strict slow rhythm. A very fat young woman glowed like a deliberate lamp, her legs so tree-like that they seemed to be growing out of the floor of the compartment. Beatrice-Joanna closed her eyes. Almost at once a dream leaped on to her: a grey field under a thundery sky, cactus-like plants groaning and swaying, skeletal people collapsing with their black tongues hanging out, then herself involved – with some bulky male form that shut out the scene – in the act of copulation. Loud laughter broke out and she awoke fighting. The train was still in the station; her fellow-travellers stared at her with (except for the adenoidal girl) only a little curiosity. Then-as if that dream had been an obligatory rite beforedeparture – they began to ease out, leaving the grey and black police behind.

Eight
    ‘W HAT will they do to us?’ asked Tristram. His eyes had grown used to the dark and could see that the roan next to him was the cross-eyed Mongol who, ages ago in the rebellious street, had announced his name as Joe Blacklock. Of the other prisoners, some squatted like miners – there were no seats – and others propped up the walls. One old man, formerly phlegmatic, had become possessed of a fit of excitement and had gripped the bars, crying to the corridor, ‘I left the stove on. Let me get home and turn it off. I’ll come straight back, honest I will,’ and now lay exhausted on the cold flags.
    ‘Do to us?’ said Joe Blacklock. ‘There’s nothing laid down, far