Authors: Andy Palmer
‘Christ!’ I felt utterly sick, physically sick. Terrified. Who else knew?!
‘Actually, we weren’t completely sure it was you who did it. But thanks for confirming that. You should be more careful in future—I mean, with confessing these things.’
‘These things? There was only one!’
‘There will be more, I’m afraid. Ok, we have talked enough now.’
I walked home. As the shock faded, I strode with an unusual sense of self-respect, my back straight, as I embraced the quite reasonable challenge of protecting others: my comrades, my countrymen, my ancestors! The cause of their pride and their freedom made me stronger by the minute, convincing me that God must be with us, and that in sharing in my own suffering they shared too my inner soul, placing in my hands that pure love of mutual understanding that had always been missing. I was no longer alone—I belonged to something greater: promoted from executive drunkard and random murderer . . . to saviour of my nation! I thought of the great men in the world: the popular actors; the talented musicians—the people I had once longed to be—and I thought about the man I was about to become.
❊
The Deputy was forty. He had arrived at Bedlam—like everyone else—by misfortune. Having applied for a job in a more congenial location, the interviewer had thrown in his final question—‘would you be willing to work at Bedlam’—to which the Deputy had responded mechanically in the affirmative just as he had to all the previous questions. He wore thick circular spectacles that magnified his eyes, adding to the permanently tense way he had about him, and then behind them his eyebrows grew together. Apart from his accounting books and network terminal the only thing on his tidy desk was a polished judo trophy (but a first dan would not be enough to save him here). He was a man of efficiency, not passion, and within a week was the only person in the institution who remained unaffected by Mary’s presence: even the Governor, despite his self-isolation and self-obsession, had begun to fall for her without even having seen her, because every report or answer he gleaned from his subordinate—in an attempt to gauge the threat to his own life—had begun to involve her rather than him: Like a mythical creature, in his terrified solitude he began to see her as his saviour; busying those minds previously set on his murder with nobler thoughts, until finally:
‘Deputy, I want to meet this girl Mary. Here in my office!’
Obligingly the Deputy brought her up. She stared the Governor in the eyes with neither malice nor sympathy, and in a moment just like all the others he became enthralled. He turned to the Deputy, displaying the only decisiveness his subordinate had ever seen:
‘I want her upgraded to Patient immediately!’ adding with theatrical compassion: ‘And she may co-habit with whomever she chooses!’
‘Frank Sloth,’ she said immediately. The Deputy was taken aback.
‘How can you know him?’
‘I saw him once.’ And the Governor gave the Deputy a nod, as if to say, Get on with it!
Nobody was more surprised than Frank, and Odd flicked his blond hair and screwed-up his soft educated face, upset at having to move out and in with Tony Blofeld whom he utterly loathed—a sixty-something ponytailed artist confined to Bedlam for his anti-establishmentarianism attempts at commercial success. Ever since, Blofeld had been quietly painting bowls of fruit or vases of flowers, or combinations of the two, which the Orderlies peddled to the devout housewives of the local religious community via a cooperative gallery—and Odd knew it all meant endless whining.
‘She only wants you because you are no threat,’ Odd said, meaning nothing by it.
‘Perhaps,’ said Frank. ‘Although I’m not sure she’s no threat to me.’
That night she entered his cell, closed the door and dropped her new Patient clothes to the floor, climbing into his bed rather than her own. Frank’s mind lit; a peculiar sensation and with a flash of youth his solitude—his sense that his manliness was gone—evaporated, replaced by an innocent love: she was everywhere all at once ‘like an octopus on heat,’ as he later recalled. She progressed hungrily in the dark: he was never quite sure which part of her was enveloping him at any particular time, losing track of which way-up she was in a vortex of endorphins and dreamlike fantasies; a feeling he had almost forgotten. He neither knew nor cared what would come next: the aroma of her skin; her hair; her sweat, as he lay there, her willing prey. For her, here was a man with whom she felt safe, and free.
The next morning Frank woke cheerfully at 6, pulled on the grey polo, grey slacks, cardigan, plimsolls. Frank belonged to the Thursday Begging Detail—a personal favour from Odd: begging being a prime source of income for Bedlam—people gave enthusiastically to keep the mentally ill off the streets—and the Orderlies chose and monitored their Beggars carefully. It was widely seen as the first step toward becoming a Prefect, and by working Frank could get things—his radio, rug and kettle, and his third-floor east-facing cell with un-barred window and flushing toilet.
Mary would be in his bed for a month before she uttered a word. Slowly she told him about her home—about the gypsy village accumulated on a strip of land revealed by a clearance for a bypass, that had never come. She told how the gypsies had welcomed her and given her a man. How the Police Sergeant had found her wandering the dirt road in her scanty rags as two families yelled at one another over a financial dispute—divided by an old lady waving candles and chanting mystic rhymes.
‘The gypsies came to fear my powers,’ Mary explained in all sincerity—powers she had refused to conceal until by sheer force of numbers and in the safety of their traditions her hosts had mustered the confidence to turn her out: ‘they hoped their “Mulo
”
vampires—bodied in their deceased relatives—might be man enough to deal with me.’
Before long she was scouring the grounds of Bedlam on hands and knees for flowers to dry and weeds to chop, there were bugs to grind and small birds to strangle as she mixed her powders and putrid potions for depression, menstrual pain, bronchitis, sexual impotence and a variety of skin conditions—she had them lining-up obediently with their gifts and flattery: Patients, Orderlies, Lunatics—reading those destinies which they’d had no reason to care about before; from the stars, tea leaves, cards and little stones, sowing pig entrails and opening palms—on and on she went until she was selectively flinging their faeces by special request across the walls of their private cells whilst singing folk songs, before interpreting the results. She would undress their dreams to reveal revolting sexual deviation from the most mundane description, or childhood molestation from a myriad of incidental characters as she exorcised their phantoms. She revealed a sticky rancid treacle that she spread on her clients from head to foot, including the bits in-between, for the treatment of the popular affliction of migraine—to the fury of the Orderlies until they realised from whence it came. She wove her incomprehensible spells and her elaborate curses in her twisted tongue; a witch-doctor unrestrained by the hippocratic oath she struck hope and fear in equal measure, turned curiosity and confusion into terror and good God insanity as though she herself worked the very darkest methods of Bedlam—they sauntered out with their heads held low, dragging their feet and biting their nails, and in the case of the one who had come to live in the greatest terror of them all—for whose seeping silicon implants Doctor Zadir was to do ‘too little too late’—came an agonising death, and nobody doubted by whose hand.
‘Deaths on that level cost nothing,’ reflected the Deputy. Indeed they tended to save money, as victims for the most part remained on the books while their still-warm remains—of the systemically forgotten—would be slid into a purpose-built oven and the ashes fired with the first offshore wind to the hungry sea.
Patients were required to co-habit, and (in contrast to the Union beyond) consensual sexual relations were positively encouraged, since they reduced tension ‘and after all cost nothing.’ Any undesirable outcome could be accommodated within fixed costs by the Resident Doctor, Saif Zadir, who was as much a practiced expert in abortions as he was in sedations and who doubled as chaplain of all faiths; remedying what his prescriptions couldn’t with incomprehensible riddles and gestures. His ward sat behind iron-framed windows on the grim North Wall, where the impenetrable drizzle carried an appalling darkness, a perennial mildew, mould and draughts, and where beyond the scant modern tools one might as easily have expected blood letting or a jar of leaches. Below, the moss grew as far as the lintels above the gloomy first-floor windows: these were the cells most often available to new Patients and runaways, eternally cold with only the obligatory Bible for warmth: a space where no solar hope ever shone, and the spot most often vacated by the spectacle of suicide.
Frank was furious:
‘You call my desire to be free nostalgia?!’ he finally managed, across an identical tray.
Odd observed Frank’s amazement, no less innocent than had it been instant, and he responded as he would with one of his top ten stories from the outside:
‘My father was Head of Corruption, that’s to say, buying the political classes of member states. That made him untouchable, and me too—I was free to take risks my peers could not and with that, together with my photographic memory, I rose through the ranks: it was my political potential they feared. But as soon as my father was dead they turned on me, under the encouragement of the Americans who had never liked me. They put me here: If I were to get out of this it could only be by escape; I doubt they will never change their minds, and if I escape I can never know any peace.’ He flicked his blond hair clear of his blue eyes—it flopped straight back down again with the charm that made him so easily liked. Frank, rather, was dark and difficult, and Odd always sought to help him.
‘I was Development Director of Repetitive Conditioning,’ Odd continued proudly: ‘where you can cross the road and when; where you can park your car and when you’ve got to be back; report your gas usage—on time—and go for a check-up; sort your rubbish and detail your taxes: Control their actions, you control their ideas. It was a great job, no mistake. The re-naming of the old Sunday to Family Day, and Saturday to Friends Day were my projects,’ he glowed.
‘You see,’ he concluded, ‘your notion of freedom is a fantasy.’
Here in Bedlam, that very same competence that had had Odd interned remained impossible to suppress. Indeed, his desk was dotted with miniature monuments to that: the movie figurines given him on occasion by the Orderlies for whom he organised sex. And Odd, as Head Prefect, had access to the Head Orderly, and even at times to the Deputy: to Odd, such connections and responsibilities, his leather shoes and woollen jacket, made his life understandable; valuable. For Frank, they would have achieved the opposite—a betrayal of himself. Frank’s disinterest was the same loyalty to his self that had got him into Bedlam in the first place, whereas it had been Odd’s over-commitment to the system that had done it for him. And neither could change.
Frank liked to play chess, not simply to occupy his brain but as an opportunity to retreat into the freedom of his own intellect. Odd chose to lead exercise classes, draw-up cleaning rosters, and watch TV.
‘We’d better get moving.’
They stopped talking and wolfed down their pudding, to finish-up before the Lunatics rose from the Dormitories like cockroaches at two.
Frank walked meditatively toward the Great Hall, a bare breast brushing against him was followed by a vicious scowl: Jennifer Jolly, at least that’s what they called her—a fertile girl who roamed Bedlam perennially naked, dancing and skipping like a fairy humming identical tunes, or else scurrying wall to wall biting people’s heels and who, no matter what anyone tried, refused to wear anything. And with time, as in the case of our official partners, the Residents had mostly grown accustomed to it. Still, a week before, she’d taken out the eye of a charmless suitor—in defence of her hymen that hearsay had it remained intact, and Frank felt almost flattered she imagined him a threat.
He sat down in the Great Hall opposite Blofeld, the chessboard between them. Frank didn’t like Blofeld very much, but he was usually quiet while they played.
‘You know the good thing about getting older, Frank?’
‘What?’
‘The girls always look younger! Take Karen,’ and he gestured toward a forty-something woman. ‘To me she looks young! I have her once a week, Monday afternoons—and in exchange I do her cleaning shift in the canteen. And it feels like I’m having a twenty year-old!’
Frank wasn’t sure if he was supposed to clap. ‘What’s the exchange rate?’
‘One hour in bed for six hours of cleaning. Hot ones ask for up to thirty!’
Frank could never understand such sacrifice, and while he was weighing it up and contemplating the unpalatable truth that those who work the hardest get the most, Blofeld took his queen. Odd chuckled insanely about something as he sat down beside them.
❊
I arrived in Pratt’s Bottom at the family farm, just outside Canterbury. It was a place where people would still gather to festively slit the throat of a pig, to collect its blood in a kettle for frying with onions, then burn the skin and give the shrivelled little hooves to the children to stick on their fingers for whistling at one another. Despite its proximity to the city, it was a place so small and unremarkable that many would deny its very existence with complete conviction. I hadn’t been home since my mother’s funeral.
My brother Dave, the elder son by those crucial minutes and the one they said had the charm and personality, inherited the entire farm when our parents moved to a cottage in the village. And thenceforth, since retiring from teaching at the local elementary school, my mother had dedicated her time to making tea and cakes, which she’d served with dainty chinaware on a silver tray over embroidered tablecloths.
Before marrying our father, she had given her energies to the Church, leading her to be on first-name terms with various African priests and tyrants, whom one by one she would recall sentimentally to the sound of silver spoons on china saucers. For years, she continued knocking off Sunday sermons in the local pulpit for old time’s sake, until our father came to suspect she was ‘up to something with the churchwarden’, and right to the end she would reprimand me for not using my ‘blue books’—my bible and song book, even though one of them was black.
But I had always had a nauseous relationship with religion, dating back to my days as a choirboy being beaten-up in the vestry by bastards in cassocks. I regularly vomited in weddings and lesser ceremonies, though not deliberately, once firing it spectacularly between two clenched fingers, and I very clearly recall the choirmaster himself calling me a ‘loathsome little shit’.
It was normal practice to favour the elder son, and necessary, so I had moved to Canterbury for the city life, multicultural and cosmopolitan—but, back home now in the fresh air, remembering the purity of real labour and how it cleanses the soul, satisfies the body, sharpens the mind, I understood how those shiny offices marble-coated with other people’s money can dirty your heart as surely as the heavy soil of Pratt’s Bottom would dirty your hands.
The city had long been my sanctuary: the space of the countryside had always represented isolation, not freedom—a place where time slows down to show its emptiness, as in a library or a bank. But now all that seemed to have changed—the walls of the city had closed in
.
‘Hey, Ollie, welcome back to the real world!’ Dave exclaimed. ‘Let’s have a brandy!’ He whacked me on the back as if he was trying to dislodge something, then gave me a stubbly kiss on each cheek.
I had always hated that kind of physical friendship, so common in the countryside, but after the detached city life I couldn’t stop a smile from spreading wide across my face. I had always been the smaller—my brother had a powerful physique—and every year seemed to leave him stronger and surer than the last. An identical twin could hardly have been more different.
But we’d both been accepted as Upper Class. The process had been entirely thanks to the efforts of our spirited mother—a ‘Lower’ by birth—who as a talented young woman had been relocated to teach in the Upper Zone, and married an Upper farmer.
We had inherited our looks from our father, the looks—if not precisely the outlook—of an Upper: we were tall and slenderly-built, with narrow handsome faces, bulging foreheads, and large eyes set widely apart with long eyelashes, either side of an elegant nose. Plus, we’d been blessed with wonderful teeth and we were almost smooth-skinned. Boys will be boys, of course, but we’d also been been taught to appreciate good music, art and fine food at school and at home. Then, as young men, we were surrounded by peers who were curious, playful, charming, sociable and cooperative. In adulthood, we’d received healthcare, pensions, re-education and subsidies, and like most Uppers, we habitually referred to the Lowers as ‘Bunkos’—a derogatory term.
The Lower Classes—whether male or female—tend to be stockily built with a straight low forehead and wide flat face, small nose and more rectangular eye-sockets. They are more hairy, often hunched, have eyes set closer together and below that stunted teeth, shorter limbs, bowed legs and stubby fingers. They are slower and heavy, and immerse themselves in low culture: reality TV, spectator sports, crass humour, weak morals, cheap alcohol, karaoke, billiards and crystal meth. Their disposable income is carefully managed by the State Treasury, and successful Lowers are brought back down to size by onerous tax investigations and compulsory purchases.
The Uppers take moral responsibility for order and progress, for the greater good. They are brought up with a sense of duty that reaches beyond the satisfaction one can achieve from mere financial prosperity. That said, they are well-fed and long-lived: exercise takes a central role in their lives—particularly team sports—and along with modern religion this forms a key hub of their social networks. They are clean, tidy and bright, and live in comfortable gated Zones sectioned-off in the best geographical areas—Provence, Tuscany, the Cotswolds—from which they select those leaders best able to propagate this workable system: a system founded on the principles of stability and growth. Note: not equality. Benefits are rained on those most likely to convert them to progress, i.e. to Uppers—thus the misery of the Lowers is a necessary element of that progress. Aside from the occasional charity fund-raiser or evening news item, Uppers feel no sincere guilt: spread the wealth out and nobody will have the time, conviction or education to take the species forward.
Uppers benefit from genetic medication to increase their natural lifespan—hence they become richer, better informed and are able to plan long-term. At well over 100, they are still healthy and can enjoy their work. In their wisdom they recognise youth as the source of new ideas and talent, and so value and nurture their families. Meanwhile, Lowers are encouraged to take voluntary sterilisation in return for financial reward.
My mother’s Lower siblings never found jobs, their clothes ill-fitting, worn and dark. They were dirty people struggling with cheap addictions that made them shockingly ugly, violent and paranoid: they would mock me—the tone of my voice, my clothes and hair—yes, as I walked down their street I was their clown and amid this ignorance they accepted the very poverty that forced them into state work groups: digging ditches, clearing undergrowth and harvesting vegetables, or in winter clearing snow; under the control of a leader with total power—an Upper—who could take away their pitiful income on a whim. Going for months at a time, they would sleep in grubby camps full of grubbier people: but they could offer me no interesting opinions or perspectives other than the visual—they had no interest in being saved.
I recalled the stories of how my mother’s parents’ large family house, once sub-divided into lucratively-rented apartments (they were the remnants of the old ‘middle class’), was requisitioned by the District Council, good God, and handed to the tenants in the interest of welfare! —lazy Lowers who’d never done more than the absolute minimum in their lives; eating, sleeping, drinking and multiplying, then handed the benefit of generations of thrift and graft; and how self-righteous officials would sweep their attic for food each autumn and take a share of every pig whose throat was cut. Then away went the horses too, all of them, until grandmother God bless her strode into the Central Office of Agriculture looking for the thief no matter what and demanded their return: ‘For how can we work without horses?’ And lastly I recalled my mother’s tales of how in the poverty of that hopeless acidic soil and tiny peasant lots newborn babies would be cast-out, and the elderly made to sit at the back of the church to feel the guilt of their uselessness.
During my grandfather’s time, Uppers and Lowers lived more alongside one another: inner city ghettos and peripheral slums rubbed shoulders with upmarket townhouses and affluent suburbs, but as the lifestyle gap grew greater separation became desirable. Even now, the Lower rural zones—located in the less desirable regions—often exist beside fertile land owned by Uppers, and in the dying city centres some Uppers (—myself included) necessarily find themselves in ‘no man’s land’, only a street or two away from the Lowers: their antiquated blocks grimy with neglect. Their stunted children attend dumbed-down institutions designed to ‘teach them their place’, whilst extracting that one-in-a-hundred—like my mother—considered able to contribute to progress. The remainder are left to compete frantically for the limited resources and jobs of the Lower ‘communities’—where beggars litter the streets; the Lowers pass them without noticing: along with comfort they lost their sympathy, and their honour—they steal and deceive. The Uppers see this as the natural condition of the Lowers, and seek to encourage it: so long as the Lowers lack cohesiveness, they represent no threat to progress. Never, of course, do the Lowers have the vote; nor do they ask for it.
The rest of the family left us alone and we sat at the heavy oak kitchen table. Dave smacked down two glasses and reached for an unlabelled bottle from the shelf above. Concocted in the barn, the family’s pear brandy would knock-over a shire horse. We downed our drinks, slammed the glasses back on the table, then again, after which Dave looked me straight in the eye:
‘So, how can I help?’ he asked. ‘I know something’s up.’
I knew my brother was no lover of the bureaucrats: he hated Brussels for rearranging the farms for the ‘public good’, but I could have no idea how deep those feelings ran. I could do nothing but gamble, so I told Dave the whole story (leaving out the murder bit).
Neither of us uttered a word for twenty minutes, and the empty glasses stayed empty. Dave stood with his back to me, his hands resting on the windowsill as he surveyed the farm and life his own brother was asking him to risk. Finally he spoke.
‘You’re bloody mad, Ollie, but I know you mean it. I understand, of course. It’s a decision for life . . . you do know that? They will never leave us alone again. I want you to think about it, sleep on it: sleep on it for a month, in fact. Will you promise me that? Then, if you are still serious, I will do it.’
It was true, I thought. The cities had been indoctrinated, but the farmers, surrounded by the philosophical good sense of nature, knew right from wrong and sense from bullshit. They were people of principle, made strong by their faith in their instincts.
‘My brother’, I said to myself, freed from the tinge of jealousy for perhaps the first time in my life, ‘is one of those people.’