Inner Circle Read Free Page B

map of Britain, flashing section after section against a net of squares, which seemed to be suspended beyond the wall of the box. This was how images appeared, extending the tangible area. Sailor knocked his fingers badly, when he tried again to show a line on the map.

    ‘We could hear a train before you came in. You know there are trains running under England, from Dover to Leeds, from London to Durham, places like that, and that’s where we come from.’

    ‘From down there,’ Joker said.

    ‘Oh, yes—I would like now to be on the small Inner Circle and on the big one which doesn’t stop at many places. You see names flicker by and then it’s York, you don’t get off, because you want to go round a full circle, London to London, all the time under the coast, with waves splashing three thousand feet over your head. It’s fun, and that’s where we came from, Joker and me.’

    ‘And you, too, I think,’ Joker said. He tried to embrace me but there wasn’t enough room for that. Then the box started exhaling whiffs of petrol and fried fish, a saucer rolled by, milk oozed from one of the squares and a puzzled cat walked right across the map and vanished, it seemed, into Joker’s hair.

    ‘That’s him,’ said Sailor, ‘the pond will come next.’

    But it didn’t. Instead, for a well-focused moment we saw a boy munching a sandwich on an Underground platform. A poster behind him said Top People Wear Hats.

    ‘He looks like you, Dover.’ I felt Sailor’s finger on my nose. ‘Though he could be me,’ he added. Then his voice thickened. ‘It’s time I had a wife or two, you know.’

    As he was saying this, the screens around the wall merged into one another, the net remained behind them but now it looked more like grating with several paler bars reinforcing a further background. Animals emerged, big, small and partly visible, they paced along the net, yawning and sneezing, then the smaller of them began to leap through the squares, somehow missing us by an inch or less, then they reappeared, one by one, on the screen opposite.

    ‘I should have a couple of wives, you know,’ Sailor whispered into my ear and his hot fingers fondled my elbow for a while.

    ‘That bitchdog stinks,’ Joker made a spitting noise. ‘She’s on heat. Keep away from her, Sailor.’ He tried his best, now leaning against me, now against his brother.

    Across the full length of the screen an elongated spaniel was mounting the bitch, regardless of the bars and squares, his enthusiastic tail whipping his own behind as his head moved back and forward. After the dogs, pigeons and hens flapped their wings. The cackling was hysterical, and feathers flew about for the arrival of the cock, who made a jumping entry into the turmoil, copulated briskly from hen to hen, glancing at us sideways with a beady, cynical eye. Now, gentlemen, I’m not boasting, it’s just a job and it’s already done.

    Animals were our educators: we hardly ever viewed human performances.
    Sometimes by mistake a scene from the surface registered itself on the screens as it was taking place outside: a standing couple, a standing copulation. Or the memory would I throw up a picture on to a confusion of hind legs, tails, tongues and beaks. Now it came. I remembered and simultaneously saw, and they saw with me. Rain, bending forward, September supporting Rain’s head with her legs; my belly flattened against Rain’s buttocks, trying to raise them. She bent farther down, sweat from her spine now trickling towards the neck, and the whole balance of Rain’s body seemed to flow into the knees and the hands below them.

    ‘Rain, I have your eyes now’—and the feathery, cackling noise fell upon September’s words.

    ‘And were we then your brothers?’ Sailor asked me when the picture vanished.

    ‘I don’t remember. Let’s get out of here.’ Joker helped me to find the lock on the door.

    In the pale blue of late afternoon Leeds had prepared an acrobatic