The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

work.’ Young Jack Phoenix yawned; Tristram noticed, for the first time, black hairs on his cheekbones. 22 − 21 − 20 − 19. ‘Police on the docks,’ Durtnell was saying. ‘Only way to deal with the bastards. Rough stuff. Should have done it years ago.’ He looked with approval at the grey police, blacktied as if in mourning for Pelagianism, light carbines under their arms. 12 – 11 – 10. In imagination Tristram punched a homo or castro on his sweet plump face. 3 – 2 – 1 – G. And there was the face, neither sweet nor plump, of his brother Derek. Both looked astonished at each other.
    ‘What,’ asked Tristram, ‘in Dogsname are you doing here?’
    ‘Oh, Tristram,’ minced Derek, alveolizing the nameto an insincere caress. ‘So there you are.’
    ‘Yes. Have you been looking for me or something?’
    ‘That’s it, my dear. To tell you how terribly sorry I am. Poor, poor litde boy.’
    The lift was filling fast. ‘Is this official commiseration? I always understood your department rejoiced over deaths.’ He frowned, puzzled.
    ‘This is me, your brother,’ said Derek. ‘ Not an official of the M of I.’ He spoke rather stiffly. ‘I came to offer my –’ He nearly said ‘condolences’, but that, he realized in time, would have sounded cynical. ‘A fraternal visit,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen your wife’ (the slight pause before the word, the unnatural stressing – these made it rather obscene) ‘and she told me you were still at work, so I – Anyhow, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. We must,’ he valedicted vaguely, ‘get together some evening. Dinner, or something. Now I must fly. An appointment with the Minister.’ And he was off, his bottom wagging. Tristram crushed himself into the lift, hard against Spragg and Miss Wallis, still frowning. What was going on? The door slid to, the lift began to rise. Miss Wallis, a pallid dumpling with a nose that shone as if wet, breathed on Tristram a ghost of reconstituted dehydrated potatoes. Why had Derek deigned to pay their flat a visit? They disliked each other, and not solely because the State had always, as an aspect of the policy of discrediting the whole notion of family, encouraged fraternal enmity. There had always been jealousy, resentment of the preferential cosseting given to Tristram, his father’s favourite – a warm place in his dad’s bed on holiday mornings; the top of his breakfast egg; the superior toys on New Year’s Day. The other brother and the sisterhad shrugged good-humouredly at this, but not Derek. Derek had expressed his jealousy in sly kicks, lies, mud spattered on Tristram’s Sunday space-suit, acts of vandalism on his toys. And the final channel between them had been dug in adolescence–Derek’s sexual inversion and Tristram’s undisguised nausea at this. Moreover, despite inferior educational chances, Derek had got on far, far better than his brother – snarls of envy, thumbed noses of tdumph. So, what malevolent motive had brought him here today? Tristram instinctively associated the visit with the new regime, the opening of the Interphase. Perhaps there had been swift telephone messages to and from Joscelyne and the Ministry of Infertility (search his fiat for heterodox lecture-notes; question his wife about his views on Population Control). Tristram, in slight panic, leafed through memories of lessons he had given – that ironic laudation of the Mormons in Utah; that eloquent digression on The Golden Bough (forbidden reading); a possible sneer at the homo hierarchy after a particularly bad school luncheon. It was most unfortunate that he should have chosen to leave the school premises without permission, he thought yet again, on this day of all days. And then the brave spirit rose within his stomach as the lift stopped at the fortieth floor. The alc cried, ‘To hell with them!’
    Tristram made for his flat. Outside the door he paused, wiping out the automatic expectation of a child’s cry of greeting.