The Tyrant's Novel Read Free Page A

young body hung from the outer walls of Wolfmount. Great Uncle did not choose to have the people know about rashes, pimples, hip twinges, or any other sign of mortal squalor. Mrs. Douglas had got the information only from her sonless sister, for her dead nephew, as displayed on prison walls, was not readily identifiable. She had then, returning from the shops with a few modest bags of groceries, with tears in her eyes, whispered it to my wife and me on the interior stairwell of our block of flats.
    Wolfmount was seven miles west of us in a working-class area and we did not like to think of the exposure of corpses there. We did not often drive there and could forget the place. Mrs. Douglas was determined not to let us do so.
    His mother is crazy, Mrs. Douglas told us. She would like to see the body released, but they won't release it yet. Not till the birds have had their way with the eyes and the tongue. Poor boy! Poor boy!
    She rolled her eyes as if she feared someone might be listening, and lowered her voice. Too much chlorine in the water, she said. I thought he liked chlorine.
    It was a subtle reference to Great Uncle's bent for chemicals, most particularly in making war, and I coughed at the recollection of gas from my service to the state as a soldier.
    And then Mrs. Douglas suddenly abstracted herself from the tragedy, as our people had learned to do. She resigned herself to events and removed herself from them. Her hunched shoulders descended, whereas ten seconds before they had been raised high with the sense that some serious explanation was needed. For anger was a one-way street for us. It descended from heaven. It did not have the right of ascent. She turned to my wife.
    We all miss you on the telly, she said.
    I could see that Sarah was still fixed on the story of the chemically negligent nephew. She had not left it yet. My wife was a dangerous woman, a woman of conviction.
    Oh, said Sarah abstractedly. My wife was a well-known beauty, who would have been more so in a saner place, where she did not need to frown about retribution being so summary. It's very hard work, you know. Television. I'd been in that series for years and years, since I was a child.
    I understand that, Mrs. Douglas conceded. But we still miss you, Mrs. Sheriff.
    The truth was that Great Uncle had summoned the producer of the series,
Daily Lives,
and asked that my wife's character acquire a betrothed who had fallen in the final days of the war against the Others. (Great Uncle had insisted the enemy be not dignified by any other name than that.) The producer was so instructed in the hope that this plot shift might console the widows and girlfriends of the men, aged between fifteen and sixty, who had given their lives in the final, deadlocked campaigns in the straits, not far from where I had fought some five years earlier.
    A woman of Sarah's craft, a woman who had read for the stage and settled for television and film, could spot the lie behind the direction the daily television show took. She could not blame our friend the producer for wanting to go along with Great Uncle's production notes. He had three children. And besides, there
were
thousands of casualties, deaths and life-shortening injuries to be absorbed into the social fabric, to be sucked in, swallowed, and somehow reconciled by the populace. My wife had lasted four episodes as the bereaved fiancée, and then had pleaded overpowering migraine—untruth does produce overpowering migraine—and refused to appear further. It took some considerable skill on the part of the writers to explain her absence on the fifth night, but they achieved it through the mouths of the other characters, opining that not only had the Others unjustly deprived her soldier sweetheart of life, they had suddenly, through a brain clot which, without the grief, might not have formed, removed the fiancée from life as well.
    A doctor of our acquaintance testified to Sarah's migrainous condition, but she was not