The Complete Short Stories

As for the streets, traffic had long since ceased to move about them. Apart from a few hours before dawn when only the sidewalks were crowded, every thoroughfare was always packed with a shuffling mob of pedestrians, perforce ignoring the countless ‘Keep Left’ signs suspended over their heads, wrestling past each other on their way to home and office, their clothes dusty and shapeless. Often ‘locks’ would occur when a huge crowd at a street junction became immovably jammed. Sometimes these locks would last for days. Two years earlier Ward had been caught in one outside the stadium, for over forty-eight hours was trapped in a gigantic pedestrian jam containing over 20,000 people, fed by the crowds leaving the stadium on one side and those approaching it on the other. An entire square mile of the local neighbourhood had been paralysed, and he vividly remembered the nightmare of swaying helplessly on his feet as the jam shifted and heaved, terrified of losing his balance and being trampled underfoot. When the police had finally sealed off the stadium and dispersed the jam he had gone back to his cubicle and slept for a week, his body blue with bruises.

‘I hear they may reduce the allocation to three and a half metres,’ Rossiter remarked.

Ward paused to allow a party of tenants from the sixth floor to pass down the staircase, holding the door to prevent it jumping off its latch. ‘So they’re always saying,’ he commented. ‘I can remember that rumour ten years ago.’

‘It’s no rumour,’ Rossiter warned him. ‘It may well be necessary soon. Thirty million people are packed into this city now, a million increase in just one year. There’s been some pretty serious talk at the Housing Department.’

Ward shook his head. ‘A drastic revaluation like that is almost impossible to carry out. Every single partition would have to be dismantled and nailed up again, the administrative job alone is so vast it’s difficult to visualize. Millions of cubicles to be redesigned and certified, licences to be issued, plus the complete resettlement of every tenant. Most of the buildings put up since the last revaluation are designed around a four-metre modulus — you can’t simply take half a metre off the end of each cubicle and then say that makes so many new cubicles. They may be only six inches wide.’ He laughed. ‘Besides, how can you live in just three and a half metres?’

Rossiter smiled. ‘That’s the ultimate argument, isn’t it? They used it twenty-five years ago at the last revaluation, when the minimum was cut from five to four. It couldn’t be done they all said, no one could stand living in only four square metres, it was enough room for a bed and suitcase, but you couldn’t open the door to get in.’ Rossiter chuckled softly. ‘They were all wrong. It was merely decided that from then on all doors would open outwards. Four square metres was here to stay.’

Ward looked at his watch. It was 7.30. ‘Time to eat. Let’s see if we can get into the food-bar across the road.’

Grumbling at the prospect, Rossiter pulled himself off the bed. They left the cubicle and made their way down the staircase. This was crammed with luggage and packing cases so that only a narrow interval remained around the banister. On the floors below the congestion was worse. Corridors were wide enough to be chopped up into single cubicles, and the air was stale and dead, cardboard walls hung with damp laundry and makeshift larders. Each of the five rooms on the floors contained a dozen tenants, their voices reverberating through the partitions.

People were sitting on the steps above the second floor, using the staircase as an informal lounge, although this was against the fire regulations, women talking to the men queueing in their shirtsleeves outside the washroom, children diving around them. By the time they reached the entrance Ward and Rossiter were having to force their way through the tenants packed together on every landing, loitering around the notice boards or pushing in from the street below.

Taking a breath at the top of the steps, Ward pointed to the food-bar on the other side of the road. It was only thirty yards away, but the throng moving down the street swept past like a river at full tide, crossing them from right to left. The first picture show at the stadium started at 9 o’clock, and people were setting off already to make sure of getting in.

‘Can’t we go somewhere else?’ Rossiter asked, screwing his face up at the prospect of the food-bar. Not only was it packed and take them half an hour to be served, but the food was flat and unappetizing. The journey from the library four blocks away had given him an appetite.

Ward shrugged. ‘There’s a place on the corner, but I doubt if we can make it.’ This was two hundred yards upstream; they would be fighting the crowd all the way.