Falls the Shadow

Thursday lay ahead of him like a graph, plotted round the hours and minutes of his working day, as certain and unimpressive as a formula. It lulled him, like a well-known song, offering no surprise, no danger, no hope of change. It stretched out, sub-sectioned into shifts and breaks, dull but comfortable.

  It seemed to affect everyone the same way. Mrs Colthorpe, the personnel officer, garish behind her middle-aged female executives hairdo and glasses, greeted people in the same breezy but superior fashion that she used every day. A hearty but haughty 'Morning Richard' as she swept past in cream pleated skirt and matching jacket, daubed and baubled, like an ageing cosmetics saleswoman and carrying an attach? case for effect. She too was a feminist in her own odd fashion, although at first glance it seemed more like she was simply copying male middle-management dress habits, like an inverted drag artist. But to her mind she was 'keeping the feminist flag flying', a female spy in Manland. Despite this confessed attitude she was unbiased sexually and was generally liked throughout the store, if only vaguely.

  The rest of the staff strolled in, numbed before they even began by the guaranteed boredom which awaited them. Salesmen and office staff, shop assistants and warehouse workers, all unconsciously highlighting the social instore hierarchy by being over friendly, deliberately non-class conscious. The workers, the low paid cleaners and carriers, made overtures of sympathy to salesmen and management, pretending to understand the complexities of their allotted professions, though secretly hating their self-pitying excuses invented to obscure the fact that they earned twice or three times more money for less work. And vice versa, in typical tolerant, worker-orientated management style, the upper echelons of HAGLEY's Furniture and Fittings Store claimed to 'understand' the workers, to have an affinity with them, almost, it seemed, to be their brothers in toil. In this way the workers' resentment of the management, and the management's disdain for the workers was kept at bay, smothered along with the other emotions of boredom, anger, hatred and insignificance which everybody was forced to deny themselves every day. If at any time an emotion leaked out in this calm, pipe-musicked, highly polished submarine world, it was referred to Mrs Colthorpe, Tiresius, both man and woman, who promptly numbered it, filed it, and declared you fit for work again. Richard had worked in this anaesthetic microcosm for ten years, it was so easy, like second nature, or schizophrenia.

  Taking up his usual position in the Furniture Department his mind again began to search for something with which to keep itself occupied. He had seven hours of lying-in-wait ahead of him, hours which would involve talking to fellow workers, trying to sell furniture and, and the majority, doing nothing. The first two he could manage quite comfortably, almost unconsciously, slipping into whatever role he felt was required of him - jovial, serious, keen, well-informed. That was the easy part, the acting. And keeping the mind occupied had used to be simple, too, it had never caused him any pain or anxiety before. He used to plan or dream, or simply allow himself to drift from furniture to childhood, customer to God. But recently it had become more difficult, more irksome. He found he needed a focus, either a theme or a specific topic around which to base his thoughts. His consciousness refused to float, it demanded attention, a guide, a direction. And so far he had failed to discover any convincing direction. Instead he chose subjects to think about, as if deciding on topics for a debating society. Feminism, threat of war, journalism, ecology, education, a pocketful of disjointed, complicated issues. When these became too well-worn, or too exhausting, he would choose a lighter subject, fashion or modern music, or would perhaps mentally recite and criticise a poem. But the problem remained: each topic was a topic only unto itself, there was no common thread upon which to string them. What he had was a handful of beads, what he needed was a rosary.

  Even so he had a vague idea of what the problem was. He would never have reached this conclusion, or at least it would have taken longer, if it hadn't been for Eleanor. She had said it again last night, 'You were born at the wrong time'. Whether she meant too early or too late neither of them knew. But as soon as she had first suggested this possibility, he saw it might contain a germ of truth. Trust Eleanor to supply him with it! It was true he often felt out-of-step, as if he lived on a slightly different time-scale. He often felt like a man who wakes up unaware that the clocks have been put forward or backward an hour. If backward, he wakes up in stronger, warmer light, a little dustier, somehow thicker than usual. The milk has arrived, and the radio plays music, not news. Outside the streets are full of housewives and children under five. The buses are on time, half-full, the conductor recognizably human. As it glides easily through the light traffic, it passes empty newsagents' but swelling supermarkets, knots of workmen at tea-break, and executives strolling to work. When he arrives at work everybody is on a different work time-scale, and he exists only in their past.

  If forward he wakes in half-light, chill and damp, as if in storm conditions. Strangely over-tired he creaks out of bed. The house is as still as night, whispering draughts and shivering a little too, also surprised by the early start. In the streets the lights are still on, though only just necessary in the increasing light. The streets are sparsely populated by muffled men, silently, sullenly, hurrying to work carrying chequered bags packed with sandwiches and thermos. The bus, lights still on, is courteous, afraid to damage the early morning nerves of the dockers and factory shift-workers. It's a sombre, duty-filled, dark coloured man's world, played out unwillingly but stoically to the sound of coughing and spitting and the grunted greetings of 'morn' or 'John'. Cigarettes and The Mirror, traffic warming up, even the milkman silent in the chill. And eventually, too tired to stamp for warmth, he reaches the closed office, aware that he is wrong again, and that a whole world of eight o'clock breakfasts and rowdy, child-filled, rush hours has again slipped him by, as if he never belonged at all. From this he concluded that either he, or society, or both, were to blame, but where exactly that left him he couldn't say.

  Today, for no noticeable reason, his mind turned back to the time when he was a boy of seventeen. He was studying for his A-levels, an optimistic and finally fruitless task which he was undertaking more for his parent's desires than his own. To fill in he had taken on a job as an egg collector on a large battery farm a few miles out of town. At that stage in his life his moral sense was not his own, it had been lent to him by his school and his parents, it was shared by all his friends. No objection was raised, instead he was encouraged, urged to 'fend for himself'. The first thing that struck him, virtually literally, was the smell. A choking, clinging ammonia which pervaded everything, lingering in his clothes long after he had left, surviving countless machine washes. Inside the sheds it was so strong that it was necessary to wear a mask. The sheds themselves were economically constructed, with five or six aisles flanked on both sides by three-tiered rows of cages, two-feet by one-and-a-half at most, each housing four chickens: even statistically it was appalling. It took a great deal of mental preparation to enter the sheds, and when you did you were faced with low lights, piped Radio 2 music and the eerie, ominous 'hello-hello' of the chickens. At times clear words would appear out of their constant bubbling murmurings, and then Richard would look up suddenly, expecting a fellow-worker to appear beside him wishing him 'mornin'.'

  And flies. Flies crawling over the cracked or shell-less eggs (some eggs were malformed, possessing only a thin skin, but no shell), flocking in frenzied ecstasy around the corpse of a sick or mutilated chicken. Flies in your face and on your hands, flies in the air outside, flies dying on their backs on the highly polished kitchen table of the farm house, victims of Vapona. How different it all seemed when the eggs, sorted and packed, lay in neat piles by the door awaiting the egg lorry. Dozen upon dozen of light, well-shaped eggs shining in the sunlight, held in dramatic, beautiful relief by the half darkness of the shed's interior behind them.

  That summer, those endless eggs, seemed as remote as fiction now as he looked back upon them from the beeswaxed light of the Furni
ture Department. He began to hold an imaginary discussion in his head, for and against, to see which side held the strongest argument. It was a conversation he could only imagine himself taking part in, as he believed himself incapable of such detailed discussions in a real social scene. He imagined himself talking to a Vegan or similar, at least someone who refused, on moral grounds, to eat battery farm eggs.

  'Did you feel sorry for them when you saw them like that?'

  'No, not really. They have no conception of freedom, they appear to be oblivious to their country cousins living on free-range farms. I feel no sorrier for them than I do for, say, a child brought up in a high-rise flat in Birmingham or an unemployed black in Liverpool.'

  'But there's a difference. A human being is not in a cage, it can leave if it so wishes. They have the choice. Animals can never choose, they can never leave their environment.'

  'Since when have hungry children in Africa had a choice of environment? Or a miner in Wales for that?'

  'But people can do something about it, they're not helpless. After all, they made their own mess, so they should put up with it or change it. Animals are forced to suffer unfairly, it's not their mistake.'

  'Richard! Have you handed your sales slips in from last night, I don't seem to have them?'

  The interruption irritated him, but he controlled his feelings, it was imperative to the status quo of the whole store.

  'I was off yesterday afternoon. I expect David put them in Mr Rockall's office. Shall I go and check?'

  'No, it's all right, I'll go.'

  He watched the woman recede, then tried to pick up the thread of his argument. Working from the beginning again he managed to find the point where he had been interrupted.

  'Not their mistake, you say? Nor is it Modern Man's surely. We inherited this mess, didn't we? Did you or I decide on power politics or high-rises, the arms race or the Industrial Revolution? No, it's our unfortunate legacy, it's not our mistake.'

  'No, but it was man all the same, the same species. Animals are innocent: we are guilty by relation.'

  'True. We are the same species. Then surely our first priority is to our own kind. Save the children, then save the chickens. Fair enough, it's a tragedy the whole business ever began, it stems from greed. But chickens are only one by-product of this. Humans suffer far worse even as we speak. Battery farming is unpleasant, it's true, but they lay the eggs, don't they? Until they stop, or we are in a position to help them, they'll continue to do so.'

  'What is that supposed to mean?'

  'That they are not dying, neither are they so emotionally or psychologically distraught that they can't lay eggs. They are truly maltreated, but less so than many thousand humans. It's a matter of priorities. Even you would rather see an egg eaten or chicken caged or killed than a child or baby murdered. Possibly that is Human vanity, who knows? To me, chickens are peripheral, at present, they come way down the list. First comes Humanity, the chickens will follow.'

  'Take care of the Man and the chickens will look after themselves. You're a dreamer. Man doesn't desire change as you see it. Meanwhile chickens suffer unnecessarily. We may not be able to change the world, but we can at least abolish such blatant cruelty and exploitation.'

  And so it dissolved, first things first versus little by little. He was aware of his own verbose bias, but still he had to admit that he had failed to convince. It was always the same, a moral stalemate leading to inaction, for who acts without cause? A similar feeling to that which he had felt when the bus had swept past him came over him, and he saw with relief that he had passed the time away up to tea break without even a single customer.

  He had not slept well with Eleanor, he found it strange to share a bed with someone, especially a single bed, and the constant physical contact kept him in a half-sleep, where the slightest disturbance would wake him. Her hair against his chest, a draped leg, a starting car. He would have liked to have slept on the floor or on a couch, but it was impossible to so much as suggest it. Besides, he liked to think that he preferred her company despite the aching muscles and drowsiness it provoked the next day. He needed the assurance of sex and companionship; he had to feel that he was still capable of it. So, the rest of the day passed in a blur, customers and thoughts and time sequences smeared together, amorphous, leaving nothing.

  Back in his flat he found everything interrupted his attempt to relax, to drift. His music, usually soothing, began to irritate; it too sounded smug and mechanical as it performed in perfect, noise-free stereo. He turned it off but then a new cacophony began - people walking past his window, the T.V. in the upstairs flat, the constant hum and whirr of the traffic, punctuated intermittently with a shout, a cat screaming, a falling metal object. Even if he managed to lose the sound for a few minutes, growing accustomed to its tick-tock similarity, objects would intrude. The geometry of the room and style of the furniture, the planless disarray of coffee cups and magazines, the static light. All this combined with his thoughts, as familiar and intrusive as his surroundings - pre-packed morals, clean-edged logic, syncopated emotions, monotonous ruts of memory. If it had only built up into a crescendo, a deafening, ear-splitting climax of unbearable pain, leading him to screw up his eyes, clutch at his ears and head and scream, or smash, or run. Anything. But it would never induce that height of passion, it was too insidious, too petty.

  And there could be no escape, not even in sleep. For dreams are merely the loose, formless clouds of the mind, drawn from the same world, rising and falling, separating and re-grouping, of genius in construction, but built with the same stones, unable to supply anything totally new. Dreams juggle with instinct and consciousness, thought and action, history and potential. They create accidentally, often surprisingly, but they can offer nothing totally fresh and new. And when the church bell across the floating meadow rings the pulse of the world awake, it is only a few dazed seconds before the alarm clock drags you back from drowning, painfully restores you to wakefulness, and your dream, like a ghost, flees in the light of day. So it was that Richard eventually fell asleep, his mental discomfort echoed in his dreams. And the sounds and scents and temperatures of the night played their part too, like walk-on actors, affecting the play. There was no escape.