Orwell George

difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He
had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had
never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained
all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.
Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever.
You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but
sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened
at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking
your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of
hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply
disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then
forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized
was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don`t care theyll shoot me in the
back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always
shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big
brother
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There
was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope
that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But
no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be
to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and
moved heavily towards the door.

x x x

As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he
had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was
written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible
across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have
done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to
smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was
wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a
warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was
standing outside.
`Oh, comrade,` she began in a dreary, whining sort of
voice, `I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could
come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It`s got
blocked up and-`
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
floor. (`Mrs` was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party
-- you were supposed to call everyone `comrade` -- but with
some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about
thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that
there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her
down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost
daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in
1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster
flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in
every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the
heating system was usually running at half steam when it was
not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs,
except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by
remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending
of a window- pane for two years.
`Of course it`s only because Tom isn`t home,` said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons` flat was bigger than Winston`s, and dingy in
a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look,
as though the place had just been visited by some large violent
animal. Games impedimenta -- hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves. a
burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out --
lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of
dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On the walls were
scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a
full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual
boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was
shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which-one knew this at
the first sniff, though it was hard to say how was the sweat of
some person not present at the moment. In another room someone
with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune
with the military music which was still issuing from the
telescreen.
`It`s the children,` said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-
apprehensive glance at the door. `They haven`t been out today.
And of course-`
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the
middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with
filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He
hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on
helplessly.
`Of course if Tom was home he`d put it right in a moment,`
she said. `He loves anything like that. He`s ever so good with
his hands, Tom is.`
Parsons was Winston`s fellow-employee at the Ministry of
Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity,

Orwell George - 1984

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