Ladies from Hell

by Keith Roberts

Genres: Humor & Satire; Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Ladies from Hell contains five long stories. "The Shack at Great Cross Halt" describes a Britain dominated by motorways, juggernauts and a tyranny, in which the unfortunates of society eke out a miserable existence scavenging items that fall off lorries. "The Ministry of Children" shows comprehensive schools having become terrifying battlegrounds dominated by vicious gangs. "The Big Fans" concerns an experiment in wind-powered electricity which accidentally unleashes an apocalyptic storm of effects. "Our Lady of Destruction" ironically depicts a future in which a Stalinist British government taxes 'non-productive' people (i.e. artists) at over 100% and assigns them individual Overseers to regulate their work. "Missa Privata" shows an opera singer in a communist-dominated Britain making a defiant individual gesture which will bring about her own ruin. These are not stories of spaceships and alien worlds; rather they are studies of imminent social change, written out of passionate concern about the directions in which our society may be heading - stories, in fact, in the great Orwellian tradition. Most importantly, they are stories about people: believable, defiant individuals struggling against oppressive forces.

Release date: February 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 189

Sample

THERE ARE TWO major areas of human experience that generally make very bad copy; sex and music. Which may seem a curious remark with which to preface a book that opens with Our Lady of Desperation and closes with Missa Privata. But ‘Our Lady’ is not about sex, it’s about the much-misunderstood difference between sex and eroticism; and ‘Missa’, in one sense, is about everything except music. In fact the discerning reader will detect a large gap in the very middle of the story, which he or she is invited to plug with a musical experience of his or her own.

Most stories seem to come about as a result of a collision between seemingly chance ideas; and Our Lady of Desperation was no exception. I’d had a notion at the back of my mind for years about a society so bedevilled by bureaucracy that each wage earner had a personal governmental watchdog, whose needs he was expected to provide for as well as his own; but the thing had stubbornly refused to flesh out. It was a chance remark by a friend that gave me the key. It put me on the track of the ‘Adonis syndrome’, and a lot more besides. And I hope nobody writes to tell me the story is an example of chauvinist piggery, because it’s not. Richard, as Lady A. observes, pays in full for his so-called ‘free’ love; and the price is heavy.

Dreams are another suspect and dangerous source of inspiration; in the cold light of day, their grandest conceits tend to turn to bat blood and ashes. But there are exceptions, and two of them are in this book. One is The Shack at Great Cross Halt; the other I’ll come to in a moment.

‘The Shack’ presented itself to me after a long and exciting party. A lot of ideas had been bandied about—none, oddly enough, anything to do with the story that finally emerged—and when the guests finally left I found I couldn’t sleep. I did doze off toward dawn, only to be visited by the image of a huge and frightening tree, its bole swathed with great ropes of convolvulus. It seemed to stand beside a motorway; or maybe that was just the early morning traffic, grinding through town on its way to London. The Rural, the American and the Monkey’s Grave came later. ‘Shack’ was a curious story to write; for a time I didn’t know myself what the end of it all would be, and the Cavalry coming over the hill on cue took me fairly by surprise. It was a challenging subject too, in that so much of its material was potentially offensive. I can only hope I trod the tightrope on which I had placed myself well enough to be excused.

I was attacked from several directions for writing The Ministry of Children at all. Even the title came under fire, so I’ll take this opportunity to point out that it’s a pun. I’m rather fond of them; there’s a monstrous one in ‘Missa’, I only hope one day somebody finds it. It was also said, quite accurately, that as I’m not a teacher I have no first-hand experience of what is happening in modern education. Such considerations would normally weigh strongly with me; but in this instance I reject them. While it would be invidious to quote names, we can surely all remember at least one national scandal arising from the suicide of a pupil at a Comprehensive school. What was perhaps less widely publicised was the allegation that within the area concerned, attempted suicides by school-children were currently averaging one a month. I agree I’m not an educationalist, and that ‘Ministry’ puts forward no real solution; but faced with statistics like these I reserve the right to say, as loudly and clearly as I am able, that something is wrong.

The Big Fans is, I suppose, a classic example of the conflation of ideas I mentioned earlier. I had been concurrently reading Lyall Watson’s extraordinary Supernature and Alfred Watkins’ even more curious The Old Straight Track. While neither Kirlian photography nor the ley system were concepts wholly new to me, the two suddenly combined to strike sparks from each other. If that great network of tracks could somehow be made visible, like the veins of a gigantic leaf, what a sight it would be! But I still had no story; and the tale, after all, is the thing.

A few weeks later, I was drinking with a friend in an ancient pub in Covent Garden when my attention was drawn to a striking girl in the opposite bar. She sat a little apart from her group, sipping gravely from a large mug of beer. She was, I suppose, no raving beauty. She had one of those broad-cheek-boned, curiously English faces; her hair was brown, her figure trim rather than spectacular; and she was very young. But her aura, for that moment of time, was a nearly visible thing; it tingled on the skin from yards away, like the queer breeze of an ultra-violet lamp. I don’t know her name, or anything about her; but you’ll find her description embedded in the story. She became Sarah, who is herself at the heart of an odd little mystery. Was Glyn, who plays Watson to Boulter’s Holmes, merely seduced by the beauty of his surroundings; or did a power really gather and coil in the little valley, a power centred on the strange young girl? The answer is as enigmatic as the puzzle. If we think Sarah has power, then power she has; the snake of logic swallows its own tail.

I mentioned dreams earlier on. I think Missa Privata must also have begun as one. I’m not too sure as it was a thoroughly odd experience, not quite like anything else I can remember. It, too, happened after a night with friends; a musical evening this time, in which we’d drunk a lot of gin, talked a lot of words and listened to a lot of tape. I suppose the separate elements of the idea can be dissected out readily enough; the music I’d heard, the saga of two Russian ballet dancers who had somehow offended against the State, the terrible scenes that followed the fall of Saigon. But why a young woman called Stella Welles should come knocking so insistently on the inside of my head, demanding to be let out, is more than I can say. Especially as for a non-musician a project like ‘Missa’ must inevitably have something of the nature of a dash across quicksand. For these reasons, and others, I resisted the story at first; but Stella’s willpower was stronger than mine. I worked on her for five weeks; in the end she turned and swore at me, like a cat that has had its fur rubbed the wrong way, so I knew I had done all I could. As I said, I can’t explain her; I merely commend her to you, with all my sins on her long-suffering and pretty head.



Keith RobertsHenley-on-Thames, 1978

I SPENT THE afternoon with Coventina. I couldn’t think of better company to be in. I’d been working on her for a year, off and on, and she was at the stage I liked best; I was tickling away with a No. 1 and the pigment on a palette knife, bringing up the highlights in her hair. The Overseer had taken himself off to Dorchester to grab some computer time so I knew I was in for a quiet afternoon. It was May, puffy white clouds chasing each other across the sky in approved fashion, and the Barn smelled as it always smelled, of turpentine and dust. I’d moved the easel across to get the light from the mansard. It took somebody as way-out as Lady A to put a glass roof on a Tithe Barn; but the old one had been falling in anyway, and things being as they are it had been a choice between glass and tar paper.

Lady A came over herself at four with a pot of tea on a silver tray and a plate of fishpaste butties. You can’t beat Shippam’s for flavour, it leaves all your pates for mates standing. She had a close peer at the picture, same as she always does, then stepped back. She’s a great-looking old biddy, six foot tall, straight as a ramrod and with a face like a Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh. She said, “I can never see any difference. When will she be finished?”

I wiped the brush and laid it down. “I don’t know, m’Lady,” I said. “She needs her jewellery yet. I’m still collecting it.”

She gave me a sideways look. She said, “The truth is, you just don’t know when to stop.”

I smiled. “I shall know,” I said. “She’ll tell me.”

She went back to the painting, stood with her head on one side. “It’s the eyes,” she said finally. “They aren’t human; but they’re not an animal’s either. You won’t touch them any more, will you?”

“No, Ma’am,” I said. “I won’t touch the eyes any more.”

After she had gone I shifted a stack of canvases and sat down on the old sofa I’d acquired. I looked at Coventina, and she looked at me. Her eyes are grey, the exact grey of a switched-off tellyscreen. Depthless, interplanetary. They’re telly-screen-shaped too, just a little; sort of flattened ovals, slightly tilted. It had taken me six months to get them like that. They’re not right of course; but nothing’s ever really right, that’s part of the game. She’s a full-length nude, threequarters life. Am Carpenter posed for the first sketches; the painting’s developed something of its own since of course, they always do, but a lot of Am’s come through. She’s partly decorated already, she’s fixed plastic hairgrips round her nipples and plaited a daisy into her bush. She’s a study in depth, you see; if Coventina still existed she wouldn’t hide the parts we hide at all.

When she’s finished she’s going to have a hip chain with more bits and pieces on it. As I said, I was still collecting them; I’d got an Oxo tin half full of possibilities. There was a bit of broken glass I was pretty sure would be OK, some bottle tops and a bent-up piece of dural tube. She wouldn’t think of jewellery as we do either, you see; she’d just use what she found lying about.

I didn’t feel like working any more and Coventina was definitely turning her nose up so I went through to the sitting room and pottered. There’s quite a complex built on to the end of the Barn; a lounge with a television set plus all the adjuncts of civilized living, two bedrooms, guest room, loo and kitchen. I have to share the bathroom with the Overseer of course, which is a bit aggravating; for him I mean, not me. I have some absent-minded habits that he reckons are antisocial, like emptying the tealeaves down the sink. It puts him off when he’s trying to shave. The last one didn’t bother, but George is a bit fastidious.

The lounge is part of the old Barn structure, it still has its great wooden beams. I’d spent some time making it even more way-out than it started. I carved an Owl Face on one of the uprights one night; it worked well so I added another above it and another over that, then filled in the rest with curls and squiggles. The latest thing was cutting big indents round the tops of the balloon frames. I’d gone along one wall, turned the corner and got halfway across the next. It was slow work as the old oak was case-hardened like iron, but I was still adding the odd one or two when I thought I would; the place was starting to look like a cross between a Jain shrine and a Celtic tomb.

There were more canvases in the lounge. That was another thing that riled the Overseer. Having a naturally tidy mind he reckoned they should all be down in the Barn, but I brought them through because it was generally warmer and they dried quicker.

It’s a great conversion job, I was lucky to get it. I don’t think old Ardkinglas was all that keen, he’d have taken Tranter or Merriman if he’d had the choice, but Lady A’s been a fan of mine for years. She’s buying Coventina; she’s going to hang in the Big House, on the landing halfway up the main staircase. There’s a picture light already fitted, and she’s even moving a little de Momper to make room for her. Fame indeed! I had a bit of a problem with her at first over the daisy but she saw the point in the end. Very fairminded woman, Lady A.

From the lounge there’s a little panelled passage with the loo and bathroom opening off; you can see through it down the length of the Tithe Barn. I sat and had another stare at Coventina. A shaft of sunlight was hitting the easel foot, bright as a horn note. She heard the war horns too, the trumpets of the Legions; it’s in her eyes. And perhaps a soldier gave her his cloak; a great rough Tyrian cloak, that smelled of urine. She was already old when he named her though. She was the Nymph of All the Springs; the Pretani brought her with them, from the Land of Summer.

The Overseer wasn’t back by six, which was most unusual for him, so I took a stroll down to the brook. It’s my favourite place on the Estate. It comes meandering through the fields, set with reed beds and big Rackhamy willows; it has its deeps and shallows, there are sandy banks where the crayfish have their holes and in places the current’s slow enough for the Water Plantain to grow. There’s a plank bridge with a handrail, and the dragonflies beat forward and back in summer. It’s the sort of place to see Coventina, if she’s still around.

I went and sat by one of the willows, leaned back on the turf. I was lucky: I’d only been there about half an hour when she came wading along the brook. She was hip-deep, stepping carefully; she stopped nearly opposite me and stared across with those huge grey eyes. I didn’t move, and after a time she climbed out on to the far bank. Bits of old leaves were stuck to her thighs and her fur was slicked down into a little dark duck’s tail; it gave me an idea for another painting. After she’d gone I walked down to the bridge, crossed it and came back along the other bank. I searched about where she’d stood and found an old U-bolt in a tussock of dried grass. It was half rusted away, with a lovely dark red patina. I wrapped it in a handkerchief. I couldn’t imagine how it had got there; it was a really lucky find.

When I looked up the Overseer was coming down from the Tithe Barn. You couldn’t mistake that hundred-knot walk. His shoulders were hunched too, which meant he was worrying about something. I sat on the bridge rail and waited for him.

He was breathing hard when he arrived. He said, “I thought you’d done a bunk for a minute.” He grinned at me though, to take the sting out, and his gold tooth winked. It’s always surprising how well it matches his hair.

I grinned back. I said, “You know I wouldn’t do that to you. Get held up?”

He nodded, but he still wasn’t happy. Apparently things hadn’t gone too well in the big city. Some clown in Central had fed him the wrong comp time; he’d had to wait two hours for another slot, then been given a bollocking anyway for being late. They’d nearly turned the Thought Police out. He asked me what I was doing down by the brook and I showed him the U-bolt. He looked a bit baffled. Suspicious too, though he ought to have known I’m a Trustie. Anyway, he calmed down after a bit. He said he’d put a kettle on, so we walked back up to the Barn.

He wasn’t a bad bloke really as Overseers go, except for the auriferous gnasher. It always bothered me slightly; either he was too young for it, or it was too old for him. Though he’d obviously felt it was right for his Image. He was a snappy dresser, like most A grades, and certainly a looker; though he was getting worry lines from thinking too much. I was afraid I’d given him some of them.

We had our tea, after which he retired to write his daily Report. I expected he’d be gone for some time; I could imagine him chewing his stylus a bit, wondering whether to put in about the U-bolt or not. I played Bach on the Sony system I was buying on the drip-feed. I’d set it up in the Tithe Barn; I put Coventina between the speakers to give a visual focus. The hi-fi was a negatax perk of course. It gave George a right twinge when it first turned up, but it was all above board. I smoked a pipe, my first for a week, in celebration of the U-bolt. Afterwards I got all the bits and pieces out and arranged a selection of them round the chain. It looked as if I’d nearly got enough to make a start; I wondered if I could get Am to do some model shots next time she came down.

George came through a bit later with a bottle of high-priced plonk; Goldener Winklepiss, real hypermart stuff, but the thought was there. We played some more music—he was switching on to Finzi quite well, he even asked for one of the Hardy cycles—and I showed him what I was up to with the chain. He still looked a bit uncertain; but he was doing his best. He’d had an idea a week or so before that he might be getting a posting; I asked him if he’d heard anything since but he shook his head. He was still a bit subdued; he reckoned he’d got at least another eighteen months on Overseeing, maybe two years, so if he was moved on he’d only be reattached. He said he’d as soon stay with the devil he knew. You’ve got to believe it, that really was his way of paying a compliment. I said by that time he’d at least know all there was to know about the art game but it didn’t cheer him up. He hadn’t wanted to come into Overseeing in the first place of course, none of them do; but it’s still the quickest way to Senior Management. And with a ten thousand a year mortgage and two kids booked for Eton he needed a fast promotion, Class A or not.

You get to know quite a lot about your Overseer; after all, it’s a pretty close relationship. I should know, I’ve had seven of ’em. I knew his kids were Emma and Abigail, though they always called the little one Sandy, and that his wife was Hannah. All good solid Class A names of course. I knew what they’d look like before he got the holosnaps out; the kids pretty as hell with his genes behind them, Hannah a Plain Jane. I wasn’t far wrong; but he’s a type of course. Adonis nearly always marries Plain Jane to keep the home fires burning while he larks about. She had good eyes though; looked as if she’d be a goer if she was given half the chance. Not that she’d ever get it. Trouble with the system is, the silly little bitches usually keep their heads down because they know they’ve made a good catch and they’re scared of losing it. I’ve seen it happen too often for it to be really funny any more.

As it turned out he had another cause for gloom. We were getting an inspection from an Assistant Controller next month, which was always good for the jitters. They never worry me all that much; see one and you’ve seen ’em all, sez I. But of course I don’t have anything much to lose.

Also he was getting an assistant sometime in the summer, a trainee from the Grade below him; which made it my turn to stick my lip out. I’d more or less got used to having one Overseer on my back, but two was coming it a bit strong. I wondered how much they’d expect me to put my income up to cover the extra surveillance; though with the negatax situation that would be funny as well in its way. But he said he wasn’t too concerned, it would just have to sort itself out. He was more pleased it would give him the chance of a weekend or two at home. “Home” was near Sunningdale, I’d seen holos of that as well. I’ve never really felt clematis looks its best round Corinthian columns, particularly fibreglass ones, but it was certainly a hell of a pad.

Anyway I put the best face on it I could; we talked it over for a bit then he went to warm up a pizza. He made a pot of coffee too, I really was getting him very well trained. After which we made our way to our Lonely Couches. Leastways, I expect his was; I was well enough suited. It was a clear, mild night, with that spring wind blowing and a sky like smoky milk. Coventina was still by the broo. . .