Authors: Andy Palmer
My flat had become an unintended shrine to ex-girlfriends, a museum of failed romance scattered with gifts I didn’t know how to throw away. A hand-made picture on the wall, a decorated love letter in a cupboard, the teddy bear on the sofa still with the label on, a painted egg and a number of books that all had to remain hidden because of the mistaken loving inscriptions on their insides. There were secret love notes in coloured crayon, crafted and hidden, that could still turn up at any moment to rip my heart out. And the souvenirs were in my mind too, in my actions. I had picked up something useful from each of them; one had trained me to wash my hands on returning home, another a more effective way to peel an orange and to suck aspirins before swallowing them, another how to clean my glasses with warm water and soap and to mix marmalade with natural yoghurt, and yet another to run my wrists under cold water on hot days to cool down. I’d even learnt that I could read in the bath. In the wardrobe, shirts I hadn’t worn for years, out of style, a little too small now, each carrying their memories. There was no escaping the regret: an elaborate tapestry of regret.
Motionless, I warmed myself at the TV, its bright colours beautiful against the grey beyond. The graveyard outside hardly helped, despite the fresh flowers, and for a moment I pondered on whether I would in fact feel any different were it Paris out there. I scratched my head. For a year or so I’d patrolled another greener district checking the advertisements people would tape to lamp-posts offering flats for rent or to sell, until I’d begun to suspect the local dogs and tramps were starting to recognise me.
The phone pierced the silence. My elder twin, Dave, the first-born by a couple of minutes, normally called on weekends—so this was unusual. I had increasingly come to dread the unfulfilled expectations of our parents; the need to accept an ambiguous culpability for my solitary circumstances; and the need to do more of what I already hated doing in order to satisfy them. So rather than call them, I used Dave as messenger instead.
Dave had kids, two boys—Tim and Tom. The boys were tiring. But that’s not to say I didn’t like them; I did. They understood me, better than anyone, trailing along behind like Donald Duck’s nephews. Even as babies, they would stare at me as though they’d lived it all before, or had just come through a training course in empathy from God. On the other hand, I was witnessing their evolution into objects of envy, maturing to date spirited, pretty girls for whom I would be too old, sporting haircuts identical to those that were fashionable when it had been my turn to be young. And so when I heard my brother’s voice I was filled with affection and discomfort, belonging and isolation, convenience and interruption; none of which prepared me for what was to come:
‘Ollie,’ my brother said, ‘Mum’s died . . .’
He kept on talking but I was no longer listening: in one mind-burning second everything collapsed. My mother filled my mind; for all her asthmatic wheezing, she had always been indestructible! She had, after all, been the last woman in Pratt’s Bottom to be ceremonially dragged through the neighbouring villages on a tree trunk by the single men for not marrying by the age of twenty-six. The following year one of them did finally become her husband and subsequently my father, thus officially saving her from a life of spinsterism. She would always be there, uncomplaining; wheezing but wise. How could I continue? Suddenly everything looked different. The walls seemed to be made of paper; I could have walked right through them.
❊
Gonville Broomhead was a lumbering giant. He lurched and crashed into things, willy nilly, for he simply had less space to manoeuvre than everyone else. But it was unintentional, for he was not a clown—particularly at home, where he ruled the house with an iron fist. His wife, Angie, and his fresh-faced daughter Lucy, were careful to give him a clear berth. Lucy, seventeen, was a carbon copy of her mother: both pale, lightly freckled, with an unusually delicate frame and a mass of bouncing red hair in gravity-defying curls, although mother’s was now flecked with grey. Every day, Gonville would come home from his work as a hospital orderly and drop heavily onto the same squeaky kitchen chair, awaiting his supper in indignant silence. And Angie would serve it, promptly, every day. Until today.
‘Angie!’ he boomed, for his voice was as difficult to moderate as his body.
She stared motionless, leaning exhaustedly on the table with one hand, the steaming pot shaking in the other.
‘Angie?’ now with confusion, and a split second later Angie’s hand slipped from the table-edge, dropping suddenly her head hit the table corner, and she was never to stand again.
At least that was father’s story, wondered Lucy. She’d overheard the whole thing. She had heard them quarrelling, and father had been drinking more than ever. The doctor instantly divined a weak heart followed by accidental death, but then Doctor Zadir was father’s best friend—from the hospital. And as the extended family—half the village—trailed into the rainy church graveyard for the burial, it dawned on Lucy that she would now become the one expected to deliver father’s supper on time, every day, day-in day-out: she would be the one to clean, to repair his clothes, to get the shopping and to feed the chickens, as how could she leave her father uncared-for?
A week later, her father returned home from the hospital as usual. He’d had a bad day, clearly: he was grumpy and dark, not greeting her as he burst in and sat down. Lucy knew to keep her month shut, and she placed a bowl of vegetable soup before him. He stared, breathing through his nostrils amid the rising steam, stooping forward. Almost invisibly, for it happened that fast, he flicked his hand upward sending the bowl and soup flying across the kitchen, smashing against the wall. Lucy froze.
‘I work eight hours in that miserable place and all I get is vegetable soup?’
‘We had no money . . . I found the vegetables.’ But he was not interested. Standing slowly he swung his arm so naturally she did nothing to avoid it. The back of his meaty hand gave her an almighty whack across the cheek. To him, it may have been a light slap, perhaps, but it knocked Lucy off her feet and she lay sprawled on the floor, her eyes welling and her cheek glowing and throbbing, her lip quivering, —trying not to cry for fear of antagonising him further.
The days crawled by, with the dark days broken by the angry or violent ones, until Lucy could take no more. Why? she asked herself finally, should she sacrifice her own life in the service of someone so ungrateful?
She would slip off to the toilet just to be free of him for a few beautiful minutes, to be alone with her thoughts and away from those probing eyes: analytical, questioning, patronising, scrutinising, desperate, pathetic, prying, expectant, wistful, conniving, looking up and to the right blinking twitching finger tapping head leaning legs crossing heavy breathing. Why couldn’t he just let her be? Or she’d find herself lying in her bed or in the bath—terrified that the unlock-able doors might creak open.
One night, her father had his friends around to play cards. From her bed she could hear them, banging the chips onto the kitchen table, laughing coarsely, yelling: her father betting away the same money he expected her to feed him with. She dozed off.
And the bedroom door creaked opened. Through her sleepy eyes, Lucy saw Doctor Zadir—a man in his fifties.
‘I just won you sweetheart!’
As Lucy’s eyes adjusted, she saw her father stood behind him.
‘You do as he says. Doctor Zadir won you fair and square, take off your clothes.’
‘No!’
‘I work myself to death all week! —every week for your whole damn life! You could at least do one thing to help keep us alive!’ and he stepped forward, raising his hand.
‘No!’ and she scrambled backward.
Her father turned, switched off the light and closed the door behind him. She heard Zadir undressing, then she felt him slide in alongside her in the single bed. She could feel his fat hairy belly up against her, his foot from his chaffed heel to the corn on his big toe, idling-up: she was immobile between him and the wall, his hand searching its way to her thigh. She smelt his alcohol breath. How she hated him. She lay ridged, but he didn’t care: that hand rolled on around her thigh and up beneath her nightie against the will of her two feeble hands pushing the other way. She wiggled, and he grabbed her by the throat,
‘Give me what I want or I’ll take it anyway!’
Lucy packed her old school bag—stole the money from the jar on the mantlepiece, stuffed it into her pocket and sneaked out at the dead of night. She was sure she could find work in town, ten miles away, and she walked the whole way by moonlight. As people were beginning their working day, she began knocking on doors and asking for vacancies.
But none was to be found. She walked around and around, but they all shook their heads. Father had always said how lucky she was that he was bringing money into the house. That night she slept rough, or rather tried to, because every hour something disturbed her: there was a gentlemen offering money for services she did not plan to repeat; a group of boys who ought to have been at home in bed, shouting stupid comments that made no sense; and finally a priest who seemed to realise that she did not belong there,
‘Where are you from, girl?’
‘Nowhere. I’m looking for work.’
‘You’ll not find any here, I doubt. Everyone is cutting back. Come with me, we will give you a place to sleep, and some food in the morning. But I advise you to go straight home tomorrow.’
But that was out of the question. And as she lay on the wooden floor with a blanket around her, she ran through her mind again and again what on earth she could do. The next morning she turned to the priest as she was leaving:
‘So where is doing well then? Where might I find work?’
‘Everyone talks of Canterbury. It’s the Union buildings.’
Canterbury was another sixty kilometres, but Lucy had money for a bus. She would have to change halfway. On the first bus she sat next to a boy called Ian. He waved his hands manically as he spoke, pointing things out, playing silly games, tickling her then flicking her ears and telling long painful jokes she had to laugh at. She barely had a moment’s peace, until finally it was time to get off and wait for the second bus. She said goodbye. He smiled. She felt quite sure he had fancied her. She jumped cheerfully off the bus and waited for the next one. Half an hour later it pulled-up and she climbed in, pushed her hand into her pocket . . . but the money was gone. In a terrified moment she realised that it was Ian! It had all been a ruse: he hadn’t fancied her a bit! He’d taken her for a fool, and he was right! And now she had nothing, stranded in a bus station in the middle of nowhere. And that was where she spent her second night.
In the morning she began to walk. She tried to hitch a lift but no-one would stop. Then she saw an footpath sign for Canterbury directing her into the forest, and it occurred to her that it might be shorter like that. Besides, it would be easier to find something to eat, fruit perhaps, along the path rather than on the road, and she was hungry.
Lucy walked and walked, and gradually began to realise it could take her days like this. Worse, she was not finding hardly anything to eat, whilst searching for food simply slowed her progress further, and made things worse.
It was the following day that Lucy began to really struggle. She had passed nobody except one farmer who’d told her to go to hell. She was exhausted and feint, she was filthy from sleeping on the ground, her dress had been torn by brambles, her huge hair had become matted and she already had diarrhoea from the unripe fruit she’d been eating. Suddenly she stopped, and focussed on the path in front of her, hardly believing her eyes: it was fading into nothing, into the thick of the forest. She must have taken a wrong turning, but where? She wandered around, half delirious, becoming more and more terrified as she began to understand that she was lost. She could use the sun, she thought, and she gazed upward through the foliage at the overcast sky, but she wasn’t really sure in which direction she needed to go. Then suddenly, as she roamed warily, she came onto a clearing. She heard feint voices, could see smoke rising, and she could smell, well, —she wasn’t quite sure what it was.
❊
‘You disappointed me, Oliver!’ Dickinson-Standing articulated spitefully, standing above me in his perfect navy blue Morality and Culture suit.
‘Sorry?’
‘I asked you to finish the Blofeld case. You didn’t!’
Oliver was my proper name, of course, but his use of it reminded me of my mother.
I tried to reassure him, but then said: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want to let you down,’ —my voice unintentionally raised an octave.
‘Well you did.’
Sex, was his number-one target. ‘Control that, you control anyone!’ he would say, with the zeal of a game show host. ‘Once men give up the hope of casual sex, their will sufficiently broken, they are no more trouble: they become redundant hunters, their faces reduced to dotting the hypermarkets!
’
Disobedient women were not beyond his sights either: the Union regarded the ‘family unit’ as its natural ally.
Hence a ‘choice’ called Abstinence dominated Dickinson-Standing’s programme, alongside less successful fairytales, rooting out the hurt and disease and along with it all the wonder and life. Once a month he would invite the clergy of the various faiths—who had been using this trick for centuries—and they would come, two by two, their religious cults united against the common enemy: their God-endorsed envy reeling in their minds against the echo of the devil in the buzz of casual sex. Then there were community leaders
representing educational programmes or the latest vaccine or scandal, plus one or two politicians backed by religious or neoconservative financiers and finally a whole series of half-mad study groups.
‘The Path’, as Dickinson-Standing had proudly christened it, was a tedious yet ominous document spewed out annually, outlining the good and bad in society and the progress to be made. Formulated by his group, cleared by the board of directors then approved by the Interior Ministry, it guided his team and then the news companies and other media in their moral responsibilities.
But beyond that, he really had little to do apart from finding things for his people to do. He would sit in his office on his swivelling chair gazing through the glass wall, surveying his kingdom from left to right and back again while pondering his next move, and I was right in the line of fire. Many times a day he would materialise hyperventilating at my desk and request a status update on the same project he’d asked about an hour earlier. I hardly had the time to work on my cases for all the time I spent reporting and explaining, not to mention following the ‘Quality’ procedures his paranoia had dreamt up. I’d got so flustered that I constantly felt there was someone standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, as sometimes there was. Dickinson-Standing, for his part, was eternally frustrated because the implementation by his team did not keep up with his planning and strategy.
I hated Wednesdays most of all, because of the team meeting, and the news about my mother had seriously dampened my clarity. I was reeling off a new idea on how to collar serial dating offenders—when Dickinson-Standing slammed his fists down on the table.
‘That’s immature!’ he squealed, trembling. My colleagues around the table were surprised by the volume and confused by the statement, but had been expecting the scene. I sighed: I simply couldn’t work out why my idea was any more immature than anyone else’s, (which was probably why Iwasn'
t
‘cut out for management’, as he’d screamed the previous week).
He, having declared war on stereotypes, was of course a stereotype himself. He had gone to the most privileged schools, lived in the best places and made the most money, and had never paused to wonder why. He believed in all that the Union said, and was impervious to doubt
.
Responsible for the entire Union, Dickinson-Standing revelled in his nasal aristocratic tone as though it delivered a cultural or intellectual superiority, as though the rest of us were unworthy to question him. He would use his own name more often than necessary, and drop in idioms—cats and dogs and black kettles, tightened belts and feet on pedals, fingers in pies and chickens hatching all over the place—forever reinforcing his crisp grasp of accepted wisdom. A
nd because he naturally distrusted me he’d begun to follow my profile personally even though my status only required routine computer surveillance. Such was my paranoia over this, that awaking in the night or emerging from the shower, I was unable to roam my flat naked—for fear he might be watching it the next day on his office monitor.
But I, of course, like
all those in that tower of morality—encrusted with its cubicles and coffee machines, copiers and swipe-cards, like a naturally formed monolith dwarfing everyone with its cliffs of gleaming crystal,
directing people’s lives, rewriting history in the interest of education, turning drunken writers into non-drinkers and loose actresses into loyal wives—
was amply rewarded. Besides tax-free money, there was a lifetime contract with full pension and the best canteen that money and power can buy. Whilst in our own efforts, to control society’s ‘deviations’, we were permitted to use whatever creative or devious solutions we deemed necessary.
Most of my colleagues were industrious, taking pride in their own work and tirelessly policing that of others—colleagues’ attitudes too:
search
ing for the tiniest glitch to reveal that (as they suspected) you were unsuitable, that your contribution was below average; you got too old—‘old wood’—or you needed therapy
.
My dreary demeanour repeatedly drew their attention. My drinking had become a hot potato: the computers knew I was drinking the moment it hit my blood and they didn’t like it at all. My colleagues knew I could work better with a healthier lifestyle—there was conclusive evidence for that—and live better too, be more positive, put less pressure on the system when I was old
. .
. and they were not above ganging up on me: It was for my own good
!
Of course I also had to work with the others to make my projects happen, and none more so than the technical guys—‘The Techies’—in Intelligence, their computers purring contentedly in a sealed pulsating technological womb, an unquestionable mystery to everyone else, waiting to pounce and take over with a few lights and displays here and there to keep the humans happy in the meantime. Indeed, the Techies themselves had no noticeable sign of humanity, nestling in their hilltop fortification, scoffing at the ignorance below and going at their own pace regardless. In a way, I really liked them. But I was sure they sneered at me behind my back, and sometimes to my face.
Technology had become the definer of culture by enabling both increasing criminalisation and enforcement through pin-point repression, so delivering the framework of life. You can never know if you are being observed as they correlate this and that in their search for deviation—the criminal the lazy the unstable or the inappropriate romantic entanglement. The computer is always watching, always listening, processing, and—information being an addiction—the network was built and developed to collect as much as possible without anyone asking why, as of course you can never have too much. Cameras on the streets protecting property and people via predictive algorithms, then on to track the avoidance of more and more unavoidable laws. Observation for those with a criminal record and their families—to be sure they would not threaten the Public—dishing up more frustration and resentment, and more crime, and more laws. But people were happy with it; at least the majority were happier that something was being done. Your car would be monitored so you don’t speed, don’t drive dangerously or after a drink; a personal microchip implanted to monitor your body, to send an ambulance or a doctor: to know if the elderly have had a fall or to call you to a check-up or to allot you a counsellor—all monitored through a central hub. Because there can only be progress within order. The system knows where you are, where you’ve been and when. It knows if you’re sleeping, eating, walking or running. It knows when you are having sex and for how long. It knows you’re lying. It knows if you’re being aggressive and it knows if you have a criminal or violence gene. And finally the Techies came up with the UNITY satellite system that glued the whole lot together and put an end to all that cat-and-mouse stuff once and for all, just to show they could.
Technology, in achieving everything on a micro level, had of course trampled all over the big things: freedom, diversity, creativity, compassion, forgiveness. Society was dying without a fuss. Citizens behaved not because they belonged, but because they were controlled: You won’t commit a crime if you know you’ll be caught, and if you can’t plan it, right? Rather, there are violent acts of desperation—school shootings, suicides, assaults, road rage, arson—which was precisely why the deviations had to be monitored so carefully by Dickinson-Standing’s team.
That was what Rehabilitation was for, for people like my colleague Frank; because there comes a time when a soppy Labrador can turn around and bite you. The poison must be isolated quickly to prevent negative attitudes, inappropriate dreams, antisocial behaviour and unanswerable questions from seeping out: ‘moral insanity’, they called it.
‘If they took Frank,’ I suddenly reasoned, fear seeping through me, ‘they must be on to me.’ It was a rare moment of absolute clarity, and I hurriedly wrote a message to Dickinson-Standing, announcing my resignation, and left the building.
I made my way home, crushed and alone, and that night dreamt that I had made the decision to go peacefully. By lethal injection. It was a charming occasion: I selected a mahogany coffin with cream velvet upholstery, Mum was back and Dad was there, dressed nicely, puckered up with his ten-year-old aftershave; both of them proud and smiling and healthy. Half funeral, half celebration and all in all quite wonderful: a mausoleum in glossy magenta shades, immaculate laminate surfaces shone back twisting reflections; beautiful women mingled in fabulous clothes—sculptured hair and absurd shoulder pads. But as the needle of death descended, I changed my mind.
Waking in the early hours, after a sweating restless half-sleep, I grabbed my coat and a kitchen knife and began to stalk the streets, confused and irritable. I was like a rabid dog, furious and vengeful—albeit freed, and utterly overcome by the desire to fall. I wandered into a deserted industrial area, a cul-de-sac, doubled back and happened suddenly upon a man in a grey suit: we were face-to-face.
The knife slipped easily into his stomach, blood crawling down the handle and licking over my fingers, sticky and warm. As my victim shrunk, he looked up, a million questions and memories, fleeting dreams unrealised, then slumped to the ground. It all seemed so fast, so easy.
I wiped my hand and put the knife back into my pocket, and walked calmly to the main street. I had expected my heart to be pounding viciously, to be frightened or excited, but all was as calm as if the clocks had stopped. A huge wave of relief washed through me.