...even more of John John

Every bed in the ward is now occupied. Many of the beds have their curtains pulled around them, nurses billowing in and out. There is no tea. On his way to the bathroom John John sees portly Mr Assan in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat earnestly consulting with the matron. Beside them one of the younger doctors holds a sheet of paper against a wall and writes.
There is no hot water.
"What's happening?" somebody asks. There are many instant explanations, but without the TV or radio to enlighten them all they have to go on are rumours. 'A nurse said...' 'A porter told me...’ 'I heard a doctor say...’ All the patients have stories to tell of being woken in the night by the comings and goings of porters, nurses and doctors.
Some men shave in cold water, others brush only their teeth, comb their hair. John John starts to shave. The lights go out.
"Apparently it's an electrical storm," the small pedant excitedly tells John John, "That's why all the beds are full — it's upsetting their pacemakers. Assan and Burton have been operating all night." The man sounds as if he has been involved in those operations. "They've had to take the pacemakers out and put them on sedatives instead. Some of them won’t last." In his agitation the man keeps flicking cold water off his razor over the twilit mirror and onto John John, "That's why there's no hot water. Because, although the boilers are gas-fired, they're electronically ignited. And all the valves are electronically controlled. Apparently it’s affecting everything electrical."
Breakfast is fruit juice and cold cereals. No tea, not even the offer of scrambled eggs. The nurses are preoccupied with the pacemaker intake, have no time for anyone else. Neither John John's blood pressure nor his pulse, nor his temperature are taken. He has come to accept their being taken as an inconvenience, as an interruption to his reading; now he feels neglected.
With relief he greets the arrival of the newspaperman; only to find that he has no newspapers, only old unsold magazines. The patients vent their curiosity on him. Standing by his steepsided trolley he turns from face to face saying,
"It's an electrical storm. It's knocking out everything electrical. Telly, phones, cars, buses, trains. Prints for newspapers are electrical. I had to come by bike today. Car wouldn't start. Should've seen the sky last night. There's nothing," his voice rises in his own petulant defence, "I can do about it."
Several of the day nurses don't arrive. Two or the night nurses don't go home. A sulking cleaner appears about noon with a wide bristle-splayed broom. The lights come on, go off again.
"If cars don't work, nor will the emergency generator," Osman Rustar tells John John, "Though my wife will come. She will walk. Not like these English women with their buses and their cars."
Lunch is salad.

Voice Off. Of all the three million species on Earth humanity is the only one which kills, not for food, those of its own species, which is prepared to die for the possession of a thing. Other territorial species skirmish, make a bullish display of power, lock horns or antlers in a ritual show of strength; and the loser accepts his or her humiliation and abandons all claims to the disputed territory. Not so humanity. Humanity has so de-formalised this territorial aggression that, as individuals and as groups, people are not prepared to accept defeat. Thus each of humanity's wars is a continuation of the last.
Human intelligence has come to overlook the original purpose of territorial aggression — that with the territory go exclusive breeding rights — the breeding rights being for the duration of that dominance, or solely for that breeding season. Humanity has thus forgotten that territorial aggression has to do primarily with the perpetuation of the species, not with the destruction of it.
Only when the car is stopped do the two women talk to him, to ask him how much longer. And when the car is not stuck in traffic it is stalled in the open road.

He asked for a WPC, but all are on traffic duty — Northampton’s traffic lights having become so unreliable that they have all been switched off. Not that there’s much traffic.
Only when not in the other’s presence have the two women mentioned the man; and then only to ask if his memory has returned, in order it seems that they can then cut short their visit and leave Northampton. Between themselves all they talk about is their erratic journeys here.
When finally they reach the hospital the lifts are inoperable and they have to take to the stairs. The fat one groans, the thin one hobbles on high heels. Neither seem intelligent enough to be the man’s wife. Maybe they were pretty once, DC Hawkins thinks, maybe once they were seen to contain a mystery other than their menstrual organs. Now, however, this hospital serves only to remind them of their operations, the servicing of their antique plumbing. Step, pause; step, pause; he matches his pace to theirs, the funereal shuffle in keeping with his misery.
An advocate of the new he has seen this day manual typewriters resurrected in the station; and, in a house full of electrical gadgets, on a brief visit home this morning, he had to boil a pan slowly on a camping gas ring to make himself one cup of tea.
The power cuts have also created a mini crime wave. The habitual order of their lives having been upset people are acting irrationally, are beating up their accusing wives, vandalising their disapproving neighbour's fences, robbing their superior friends. With the phones down people are coming to the station to report their grievances. He is needed there to take statements.
At last he parks the two women on a low wooden bench outside the ward, grabs the sister and explains the purpose of his visit.
"I’m up to here in faulty pacemakers. Use the telly room. I'll send a nurse to assist. In case," she says as she hurries away, "the shock proves too much."
The one available nurse is a tired auxiliary in grey and white stripes. DC Hawkins explains what he wants of her. They accompany a complaisant John John to the telly room.
"Dental records were negative," DC Hawkins tells him, "Doesn't mean you're not known though. Only in this country. I’ve been in touch with the Pakistan Embassy in London, given them all that we so far know about you. Now that the phones are down though..."
The phones being down have also put a stop to another line of enquiry. In case the choice of the name John John had any subconscious promptings, DC Hawkins checked the records for any missing John Johns. None. So he looked for any with the surname John or Johns registered as missing. There were eight, none of whose descriptions matches that of his man. He then started searching through the local phone directory, and the voting register, for any John Johns. He found forty five with the surnames John and Johns. He was about to start contacting them on the phone when the interference arrived.
Now he sends the auxiliary for the first wife and installs John John in a deep chair with his back to the telly room door. He stands opposite him. He is more interested in seeing John John's reactions than hers.
"They're just going to have a look at you," he reassures John John, "If they’re not certain then they'll talk to you."
The auxiliary brings in first the thin woman, Mrs Bofill. She comes around the chair and stands beside DC Hawkins. John John looks her over as curiously as she appraises him: specimens to each other.
"It's not him," she says. "Who are you?" she bluntly asks John John.
"I don't know," John John blushes. A natural enough reaction, DC Hawkins, decides, in the circumstances.
While the auxiliary goes to fetch the fat one DC Hawkins wonders at Mrs Bofill's certainty. After all what is the human face — shape of head, distance between the eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth; variations on which just about make us recognisably different. How different though? Take this one, he thinks, he'll do, as good as anyone else, maybe an improvement on the one you lost.
The fat one sits wheezing opposite John John, squints at him.
"I dunno," she says, "Could be. It’s been so long..."
"Do you mind?" the auxiliary drops into a corner chair, pulls out a packet of cigarettes, "I haven't had a break since ten this morning."
"Do you recognise this woman?" DC Hawkins asks John John.
The fat woman simpers self-consciously while John John studies her.
"I’m afraid not," he says.
"Sounds like him," she says to DC Hawkins.
"Could you be," DC Hawkins glances to his notebook, "Colin Geoffery Knowles?"
DC Hawkins is used now to John John's self-examining silences. The fat woman isn't, seeks a sympathetic smile from the auxiliary.
"I could be I suppose," John John says, "But then I could he anybody."
DC Hawkins wonders, if Mrs Knowles was a younger and a slimmer woman, John John might now be more forthcoming. He himself wouldn't want to be claimed by this fat old boot; but then he has an aversion to fat women.
All policemen’s wives seem to have broad hips. He deliberately married a slim woman because he didn't want to be a typical policeman. Since the baby, though, his wife has put on weight and he now wishes that she wouldn't wear jeans in public.
"Tell him about himself," he orders Mrs Knowles.
The fat woman begins telling of her two daughters, of how the youngest has married since he left, the trouble she had with the wedding arrangements, being on her own...
"Tell him of what he knows," DC Hawkins interrupts her, "Your own wedding maybe."
The shining fat woman blushes, laughs,
"You had a hangover, remember? You and the best man, whatsisname, that friend you worked with. The pair of you were ill at the reception. My Dad was furious..."
The fat woman, bottom lip trembling, weeps. The auxiliary, exhaling twin streams of smoke from her nose, wearily stubs out her cigarette.
"It’s not him," the fat woman says into the tissue dragged from her sleeve, "To come all this way... Hide nor hair for three years..."
"I’m sorry," John John says, but not for anything he may have done, just for her.
"Go home!" she sputters at him, "You don't know what you're doing," John John looks in confusion to DC Hawkins and the auxiliary.
DC Hawkins signals the auxiliary to take the snuffling woman away.
"There were two more women supposed to have come," DC Hawkins tells John John when they are alone, "Surprised those two got here. Don't hold out much hope in that direction anyway. All of 'em reckon you’ve lived in this country all your life, and if that's the case we should have records of your three fillings. It’ll all take longer now anyway, with the phones down."
"What exactly is happening?"
"Electrical storm. Sky's lit up at night. Burglar alarms and bleepers going off everywhere. We got so much work we don't know where to start. I’ll be in touch."

Voice Off. Barbarous times make barbarians of all but the stubborn.

"Take my word for it, the universe is eighteen thousand million years old. So, should we all be wiped out tomorrow, even in terms of this galaxy, let alone this universe, the whole of humanity's one million years, from its evolution until right now, will hardly rate a mention."
The two security men are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as insignificant. To escape the fug of their inflated little minds Barry decides to walk to Herstmonceux.
"Why?" the senior security man plaintively asks, not wanting to have to walk that distance.
"Someone there might've left a message for me. Might be able to find out exactly what's happening. No need for you to come." Both security men grimace at his trusting naiveté.
With no phones, no electricity and no car, the two security men have spent their day in the house wondering anxiously what they should do. Their isolation worries them. For two hours or more they discussed whether or not one or them should try to somehow get to London, or if they should attempt to contact their small local office in Portsmouth. The situation has drastically changed: both know that their orders will also have been changed; but to learn of their new orders they will have to disobey their existing orders. A dilemma indeed for two self-made automatons.
Before he reaches the end of the street Barry hears his front door slam.
The sunset is orange, the back streets of Hastings deserted. No sound of traffic, no murmur of televisions behind closed windows, only the forlorn bleating of a rooftop seagull and the syncopated footsteps of the two security men. Barry Tappell smiles — at himself in one of life's occasional tableaux of pleasing and total absurdity.
The two security men are the same distance behind him when he reaches the road through the Pevsney marshes. The sunset has now faded and the aurora is twisting in the violet sky, like hand-held sparklers fizzing deep under dark blue water. Both security men are walking looking up at the rainbow aurora. Barry waits for them.
Away beyond the dry yellow grasses Sunday church bells peal their sonorous levity. White gulls, lit by the aurora, fly flickering inland to their roosts. No horizon glow or streetlights this evening.
"’Tis a long and lonely road," he greets the two security men, and falls into step with them.
"What’s it made of?" the junior security man asks him.
"Ionised particles."
The black blocks of the castle buildings establish themselves within the pale strip between the dark blue land and the dark blue sky. The nearby yellow grasses of the marsh are alive with the crepuscular rustlings of rat, vole and warty toad.
"Wish I’d brought a torch," the older security man says.
"Probably wouldn't've worked," the younger says, asks Barry, "Would it?"
"Might."
Across the sky the aurora ripples like a fat purple and golden caterpillar.
The observatory tower is cold and silent: a vertical tomb for extinct artefacts. Barry looks into his own and into the Director's office. With his lighter the junior security man searches the desk tops for messages. No-one has been here since yesterday.
"Marie bloody Celeste," the senior security man mutters.
"You can now consider your sensible selves to have joined us freaks in this freakish world. You two aren't normal," Barry grins at them. Beyond the office windows the aurora swirls like a team of flamenco formation dancers. "Here you two very normal people are in a Sussex marsh in a blacked out science zoo. Perceptive devices all intact, are they?"

Voice Off. Because of their brief lives human beings view every transaction as having an end, as having a definitive result; rather than as all actions being a part of, a link in, the continuous process of matter.