Manhattan in Reverse (15 page)

JANNETTE

Abbey was waiting for me at Liverpool Street Station. It was a miracle I ever found her. The concourse was overrun by backpackers. I’m sure there wasn’t one of them over twenty-five, or maybe that’s just the way it is when you’re looking at young people from the wrong side of thirty-five. And I certainly hadn’t seen that much denim in one place since I went to the Reading Festival in the early nineties. Their backpacks were
huge
, I didn’t even know they manufactured them that size.

I gawped in astonishment as the youngsters jostled around me. Nearly all of them were couples. And everybody had a Union Jack patch sewn on their clothes or backpack. I don’t think one in ten was speaking English; and under half of them were white.
Ha, how do you like that, Murray? One of your big rules was that everyone had to speak English – and we all know what that implies.

Abbey yelled a greeting, and walked towards me, pushing her way aggressively forwards. She’s not a small woman and her progress was causing quite a disturbance amid all the smiley happy people. Her expression was locked into contempt as they flashed hurt looks her way. It softened when she hugged me. ‘Hi comrade darling, our train’s on platform three.’

I followed meekly behind as she ploughed onwards. The badges on her ancient jacket were clinking away; one for every cause she’d ever supported or march she’d been on. The rusty Pearly Queen of the protest nation.

Half the station seemed to want to get on our train. Abbey forced her way into a carriage, queuing being a bourgeois concept to her. We found a couple of empty seats with reserved tickets, which she pulled out and threw on the floor.

‘I don’t know where this lot all think they’re going,’ she announced in a too-loud voice as we settled in. ‘Murray doesn’t approve of poor foreign trash. There’s no way he’s going to let Europe’s potheads live in stoner bliss on his liars-paradise planet. They’ll get bounced right off his hole for middle-class worms.’

‘His restrictions are self-perpetuating,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t actually have lists of all the people he doesn’t like. And even if he did there’s no way of checking everyone who goes through. It’s pure psychology. Tell Tory tax-dodgers that no big bad pinkos will be allowed, and they’ll flock there in their hundreds. While the rest of us see who is actually going and we steer the hell clear. Who wants to live in their world?’

‘Ha! I bet the security services sold him our names in return for a nice retirement cottage on the other side.’

You can’t argue with Abbey when she’s in this mood, which admittedly is most of the time.

She pulled a large hip flask out of her jacket and took a slug. ‘Want some?’

I looked at the battered old flask, ready to refuse. Then I remembered I didn’t have the kids tonight. I wasn’t stupid enough to take a slug as big as Abbey’s. Thankfully. ‘Jesus, what the hell is that?’

‘Proper Russian vodka, comrade,’ she smiled, and took another. ‘Nathan went through last week,’ she said sourly.

‘Nathan? Your brother Nathan?’

‘Only by DNA, and I’m not even certain of that after this. Little prick. He took Mary and the kids with him.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do any of them go? The economy, sticking with their fellow traitors, blackouts, global warming, pay cuts, taxing the poor, NHS collapsing. Or in other words, the real world that everyone actually has to live in and try to make work, that’s what he’s running away from. He thinks he’s going to be living in some kind of tropical tax haven with fairies doing all the hard work, the dumb shit.’

‘I’m sorry. What did your mum say? She must be devastated.’

Abbey growled, and took another slug. ‘She says she’s glad he’s gone; that he and the grandkids deserve a fresh start
somewhere nice
. Can you believe that? Selfish cow, she’s gone senile if you ask me. And who’s going to be looking after her, hey? Did Nathan ever think of that? Oh no, he just sold out, took off and expected me to pick up the pieces, just like everyone else left behind.’

‘I know. Steve’s school is talking about classes of sixty for next term. The remaining governors have been having emergency meetings all summer, so I know how many staff have left.’ I hesitated. ‘It surprised me, I thought they were more dedicated than that.’

‘They would be if they were paid properly.’

‘The principal has to recruit another fifteen teachers before term starts, or they won’t be able to open at all.’

‘Fifteen? He wouldn’t have managed that many in a normal year.’

‘He said he’s quite confident. There’s all sorts of new placement agencies starting up to source overseas professionals for the UK. A lot of people are coming in to fill the gaps. Life’s going to go on pretty much the same as before once the exodus is over.’ That last was a straight quote from Gordon Brown last week.
Damn, I so much want to believe it.

‘Great,’ Abbey grunted. ‘Just what we’re fighting for.’

Our train started to pull out of the station. The backpackers were squashed down the length of the aisle, nobody could move anywhere. There was a big cheer when the PA announced the stop at Bishop’s Stortford.

Abbey took another swing, and muttered: ‘Wankers.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘If we ever get our own wormhole to a new world, we wouldn’t let any of this lot through.’

‘That’s the whole fucking point, isn’t it?’ Abbey snarled. Her anger was directed at me now, which was kind of scary. She gulped back another mouthful of vodka. ‘We wouldn’t want to have a new world even if we could open a wormhole. It’s a stupid waste of talent and wealth that could be used to help people here and now. We have to solve the problems we’ve got on this world first, starting with the biggest problem there is, that traitor Murray and his rathole. Colonization is imperialism, and the bastard knows it. We’ve got to teach people to have social responsibility instead.’ She jabbed an unsteady finger at a badge on her lapel. It was one showing an Icelandic whaler being broken in two by a Soviet-style hammer; but above it was a shiny new Public Responsibility Movement badge. ‘That’s what today is all about. Murray isn’t building him and his kind a new world, what he’s doing is ruining ours. You can’t just do that, just open a doorway to somewhere else because you feel like it, it’s fucking outrageous. When did we ever get to make that democratic decision, eh? He never consulted, never warned us. They’ve got to be stopped.’

‘You can’t stop people leaving,’ I said. ‘That’s Stalinist. What we’re not ready for is this panic exodus that the wormhole has made possible. Emigration to North America in the nineteenth century was slow, it lasted for decades. There was time to adapt. This is too fast. Two years, that’s all he’s giving us. No wonder the country can’t cope with the loss as it happens. But it’ll settle down in the long term.’

‘We can stop them,’ Abbey said forcefully. ‘There’s enough people taking part in the movement today to block the roads and turn back all those middle-class tax-avoiding scum. Murray didn’t think it through; half of the police have pissed off through his rathole. Who is going to protect the responsibility-deniers now? People power is going to come back with a vengeance today. This is when the working class finds its voice again. And it’s going to say: no more. You see.’

COLIN

As ever, the M11 was horrendous, a solid queue of bad-tempered traffic. It took us nearly two hours to creep from the M25 to the Stansted junction. Actually, not as ever: I was smiling most of the way. It didn’t bother me any more. I just kept thinking this was the last time I ever had to drive down one of this country’s abysmal, potholed, clogged, anachronistic nineteen-sixties roads. Never again was I going to come home ranting about why can’t we have Autobahns, or eight-lane freeways like they’ve got in America. From now on my moaning was going to be reserved for sixteen-legged alien dinosaurs tramping over the vegetable garden.

The estate car in front had a bumper sticker with a cartoon of angry Gordon Brown using a phone to hammer on the side of the wormhole.
Tax for the memory
was printed underneath. We’d been seeing more and more pro-exodus stickers as we crawled our way north. I reckoned that all the vehicles sharing the off road with us were heading to New Suffolk. After all those months of furtive preparation it was kind of comforting finally being amongst your own kind.

‘It’s the wormhole, isn’t it?’ Steve asked cautiously. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’re going to take a look at what’s there.’

‘Are we going
through
?’ Olivia asked, all wide eyes and nervous enthusiasm.

‘I think so. Don’t you? Now we’ve come all this way, it’ll be fun.’ I saw the sign for assembly park F2, and started indicating.

‘But they’re bad people on the other side,’ Steve said. ‘Mum said. They’re all Tory traitors.’

‘Has she been there herself?’

‘No way!’

‘Then she doesn’t really know what it’s like on the other side, does she?’

The kids looked at each other. ‘Suppose not,’ Steve said.

‘Just because you don’t agree with someone, doesn’t make them bad. We’ll take a look round for ourselves and find out what’s true and what’s not. That’s fair isn’t it?’

‘When are we coming back?’ Steve asked.

‘Don’t know. That depends how nice it is on the new planet. We might want to stay a while.’

Zoe was giving me a disapproving look. I shrugged at her. She didn’t understand, you’ve got to acclimatize kids slowly to anything this big and new.

‘Is Mummy coming?’ Olivia asked.

‘If she wants to, she can come with us. Of course she can,’ I said.

Zoe let out a little hiss of exasperation.

‘Will I have to go to school?’ Steve asked.

‘Everybody goes to school no matter what planet they’re on,’ Zoe said.

‘Bummer.’

‘Not nice,’ Zoe squealed happily.

I found the entrance to park F2 and pulled in off the road. It was a broad open field hired out to newsuffolklife.co by the farmer. Hundreds of vehicles had spent all summer driving over it, reducing the grass to shredded wisps of straw pressed down into the dry iron-hard soil. Today, twenty-odd lorries were parked up at the far end, including three refrigerated containers, and a couple of fuel tankers. Over seventy cars, people carriers, transit vans, and 4x4s were clustered around the lorries; most of them contained families, with kids and parents out stretching their legs before the final haul. The fields on either side replicated similar scenes. In fact all the countryside around the wormhole was the same. It made me feel a lot more confident.

I drew up beside a marshal, who was standing just inside the gate, and showed him our card. He looked at it and grinned as he ticked us off his clipboard. ‘You’re the doc, huh?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Fine. There’s about a dozen more cars to come and we’re all set. I’m Barry, your community convoy liaison, so I’ll be travelling with you all the way to your new home. Any problems, come and see me.’

‘Sure.’

‘You want to check over the medical equipment you’ll be taking, make sure it’s all there? Your new neighbours have been going through the rest of the stuff.’

I drove over to the other cars and we all climbed out. Several men were up in the lorries, looking round the crates and pallets that were inside. Given how much we’d spent between us, I was glad to see how thorough they were being checking off the inventory. In theory the equipment and supplies on the lorries were enough to turn us into a self-sufficient community over the next year.

‘This shouldn’t take long,’ I told Zoe. ‘We need to be certain. In the land of the new arrivals, the owner of the machine tool is king.’

‘We’ll go meet people,’ she said.

I met a few of them myself as I tracked down the five crates of medical supplies and equipment. They seemed all right – decent types. A little over-eager in their greetings, as I suppose I was. But then we were going to spend an awful long time together. The rest of our lives, if everything went smoothly.

Half an hour later the last members of the group had arrived, we were satisfied everything we’d bought through newsuffolklife.co was with us, and the marshals were getting the convoy organised for the last segment on Earth. Put like that it sounded final and invigorating at the same time.

‘Where’s the wormhole?’ Steve asked plaintively as we got back into the BMW. ‘I want to see it.’

‘Two miles to go,’ Zoe said. ‘That’s all now.’

The lorries were first out of the assembly park and onto one of the new tarmac roads that led to the wormhole, with the rest of us following. There was a wide path on the left of the road. Backpackers marched along it, about ten abreast, a constant file of them. I couldn’t see the end of the line in either direction. They all had the same eager smile on their faces as they strode ever-closer to the wormhole. Zoe and I probably looked the same.