The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

one learned to live with it. But mistakes still being made. The unemployed were occupied, black midland figures of animated sacks, inplanting young trees along the grand synclines and barrows of the embankments and cuttings and underpasses, thereby destroying their geometry, mistakenly interfusing an abstract of nature back into the grand equation. Got to banish that dark pandemic nature. But the monstrous sky, squelching light out of its darkest corners, counteracted this regressive step towards out-dated reality moulds. The PCA bombs had squirted from the skies; it was their region. Science presided.

      There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship

      Sailing every ha’penny.

      The goods you buy with this new coinage

      Weren’t made any place I heard of

      They give out the meagerest sounds

      But I don’t hear a thing any longer

      Since I do my personal thinking in pounds

      I had a good family life and a loving girl

      But I had to trade them in for pounds

      The damned birds were coming back, too, booking their saplings, grotesques from the pre-psychedelic twilife, ready to squirt eggs into the first nests at the first opportunity. They moved in squadrons, heavy as lead, settled over the mounds of rubbish, picking out the gaudy Omo packets. They had something planned, they were motion without truth, fugitive, to be hated. He had heard them calling to each other in nervous excitement, ‘Omo, Omo’. Down by the shores of the dead sea, down by the iron sunset, they were learning to read, a hostile art. And the new animal was among them by the dead elms.

      Angeline was comforting Greta, Ruby watching her every fingertip, Burton was turning the pages of ‘Man the Driver’, thinking of a black and red tie he had worn, his only tie. Words conveyed truth, he had to admit, but that damned tie had really sent him. He thought he had tied it round the neck of a black dog proceeding down Ashby Road. Spread the message.

      ‘Greet, you didn’t hear of a dog involved in this pile-up?’

      ‘Leave her alone,’ Angeline said ‘Let her cry it out. It’s like a tide.’