Dan arrives a little late. He has been in Deptford library, helping out a friend of his older brother’s, Min, who took out some bizarre mortgage ten years ago and is suddenly getting hit with massively increased payments just as his job’s on the line and he can’t understand why, panicking, not really sure what he signed up for back when he was eighteen and his Mum and Dad were urging him to get on the ladder, sinking their own savings into the place too, so that now he feels he will be letting everyone down, ruining everyone’s life, if he can’t keep up the payments. Dan, for all that he has a degree in International Economics, can’t quite figure out the fine print either and has advised him to get more sound, legit legal advice, but Min can’t afford that and so he is thinking that well, he could sell now, get enough to pay off his debts probably, but they have got another kid on the way, need more space and where will they live? They could get somewhere with three bedrooms outside London but then where will he work?
Dan has no answer for him, there aren’t any, no smart strategy, no moves that haven’t been countered in advance, everything has already been priced in and besides he is tired anyway from his morning stint at Heart of Chicken, called in at 6.00 again. He sleeps now, Dan, with his phone in his hand, because he knows they have systems that send out work requests to up to a hundred phones simultaneously, and so he will be the first one to answer. He has even found himself – perhaps precisely because he is asleep, if he ever really allows himself to sleep these days, and his consciousness isn’t there veiling or compromising his pure autonomic response – answering the phone slightly before the call comes through, almost as though he senses the intention to dispatch the message the same way they say dogs know when their owners decide to set off and come home, and rouse themselves to go and wait patiently, mysteriously by the window, gazing out at the road, panting softly.
The phone buzzes, his thumb automatically increasing the pressure on the accept button that has appeared beneath it, eyes opening, squinting at the illuminated screen in the dark hoping he hasn’t agreed to something too far away or that starts too soon. What time is it now? Forty minutes to get up and dressed, bike it to Heart of Chicken up in Woolwich, no breakfast, it’s raining outside, thirty minutes there and back for two hours work but he knows that Heart Of Chicken’s parent company share information with
USG
anyway and that if he refuses three offers in a row it will impact on his Viability Rating, the full spectrum assessment protocol run by
USG
’s Human Capital Division. And even though he is violently, ideologically against the system he still can’t bear the idea that his treasured triple A plus rating would be lost, especially as it will impact on all other kinds of ratings, his credit rating for instance, and then slowly they will start to put the squeeze on him for repayments, especially as his student debt is one of a tranche that the Government has agreed can be abondized, and that his ability to roll over his repayments on his student loans depends on that rating staying high. He has seen people a year or two younger than him, the guinea pigs for the new system, fuck up, misstep, take a negative hit somewhere on their Viability Index often in areas they had no idea were open to assessment, see that other areas start to recalibrate in response, find their interest rate going up and up from week to week, then day to day, hour to hour in a vortex of accelerating, uncontrollable, mutually reinforcing algorithmic panic. A few weeks ago he sat in the square next to Wavelengths with Will, looking at his phone and in the end laughing at the insane exponential increase in his personal interest rate and their conversion into an equivalent number of giveback hours, several lifetimes worth and still rising. Your work life just went parabolic across about five generations, he said. They laughed at the insanity of it, there seemed to be no other response, but here it is, just as with Min who can only keep his repayments down by signing up his kids to his mortgage, intergenerational, possibly endless, for the ex-council flat at the back of Deptford Broadway he thought he was buying. Dan has a dark inkling of what the inevitable outcome for friends who have got caught in that upward spiral is, the term of the debt extending until a default line is reached and then they are bankrupt, unable to ever pay it back and are bought out by
USG
and funnelled into Permanent Giveback. They will be obliged to have children in order to have someone to pay back the debt, the cost of raising them added to the multigenerational bill stretching on into infinity.
Should have read the fine print.
Dan wants a pint, a simple pint of beer, just one, or maybe two halves and a little bit free getting a taster of the different cask beers on rotation in the Jobcentre. It closed down a few years ago and was squatted for a while before it got converted into a bar. Now anyone local has to report to the Catford Centre. Lewis went up there once on a school trip, mandatory introduction to the kinds of programmes on offer from
USG
, and the place looked like a prison, security guards on every floor, touch screen computer terminals covered in grease or not working at all, no chairs or desks, seemingly no staff. The corporate video in the big windowless room showed people picking fruit or hurrying through warehouses or pouring coffees accompanied by a semi-coherent explanation from a dazed looking man in his twenties, reciting a script about the numerous ratings levels that would apply to them by the time they reached 18 as part of the Government’s Universal Human Capital Assessment Index, a one-stop rating system that incorporated everything from levels of body fat and eyesight tests through to exam results, work experience, psychometric tests and character evaluations, and would be phased in as a more comprehensive alternative to the only recently introduced Viability Index.
The pub is full of students from Goldsmiths and Greenwich University. She has always refused to go in as she knows there is an unofficial door policy about keeping the wrong people out, but in practice this never needs to be explicitly enforced, already there is a powerful hex of wealth and white privilege, a magic threshold that means that people stop and glance in through the window, hear the music, see the faces, the decor and understand. She heard Laura and her friends talking about this just the other week, gentrification, the way wealth and poverty coexist, one on top of the other, the same streets, the same spaces, yet seem to be two radically separate realms, people negotiating in and around each other, screening things out, being buffeted and directed by sets of unconscious pressures. Lewis wants to smash it to pieces, break down the invisible barriers, really see, but she knows how hard it is, how hard it is. In the Jobcentre everyone’s white, at least down in the Wetherspoon’s in Greenwich, by the
DLR
, you get a mix of people, but this has become a separate space. Yes, she is struck by the fact that on Resolution Way the art space she has been going to for meetings is called The Enclave, yes, she sees how this place floats on the High Street connected in a line of power, a shared dimension of futurity, to the rest of the Antic collective’s pubs, in the way the flats above
TASTEE£
do, the building bifurcated on a horizontal temporal plane, the way that Canary Wharf, just across the river, always visible, floats outside the space-time of Tower Hamlets, London is itself outside the rest of the country; these multi-temporal spaces, worlds within worlds. She hovers in the doorway of the Jobcentre; you can no more cross those thresholds, breach those barriers, than step into the past or future.
She feels the moment of resistance, it must come from within her but it feels as tangible and real as though it were some physical barrier itself. Then she is pulled in behind Dan as he surges in, settles for a pint of Gunner Smith, a 9%
IPA
, sips it, settles back on the tastefully shabby settee. A pint mid-afternoon with nothing in his stomach but a bit of muesli will go straight to his head, good value for money. Have a siesta, and then tonight he can work on the paper he’s going to give in The Enclave on Saturday, part of
Burst the Bubble’s
on-going series of workshops.
Will Lewis be there? Yeah she says, of course.
Laura coming too?
She nods.
How’s your mum doing? Lee?
We are getting ready to leave, I guess, she says. Lee’s alright.
What about you? She asks Dan if he will help her out with stuff she’s studying, things she is not sure she has understood, but he looks too tired; she doesn’t want to put pressure on him.
She worries about Dan. He has always been like a brother to her, close, was always the smart one, went to University, got his degree. He could be across in Canary Wharf now, making his fortune, except he said when it came to it he just couldn’t do it. He knew straight away more or less, going to University, the life this might get me isn’t for me. Of course he worked hard, he did well, but if he ends up in Heart Of Chicken through
USG
’s Just in Time Temps programme, what hope is there for her? Still no, she mustn’t think that way. Dan says it, her Mum says it, Laura says it, it can change, it’s a set of decisions, a way of arranging the world, we can change it. Yes, we can, if we are not too exhausted, demoralised, depressed, half starved, drunk, messed up, focus so scattered, lives so unpredictable that any cohesion has gone, that even the smallest obstacles seem insurmountable, the most trivial challenges impossible to meet. She read something or did someone tell her, that slave owners always faced this delicate balancing act. You need to feed the slaves enough for them to be able to perform the work, but not so much that they have surplus strength that might be directed elsewhere.
How to maintain the optimum level of starvation, that’s the trick, that’s the art.
When she arrives at The Enclave, Derren Jones is talking about the inconclusive, finally ambiguous Spanish pre-Crisis social movement
Pinchar la Burbuja
, inspiration for their own
Burst the Bubble
campaigns, after which Andrew Gillingham will be talking about the crisis of the Seventies and the series of overlapping unresolved crises that have been circling the world since the dot com collapse of 1999. They are in Enclave 4, the art space down on Resolution Way. After the meeting they will assemble at the station, summoning forth, from phones and across networks of friends and fellow activists, sympathetic groups, a wildcat demonstration; point of protest: the Shard.
There are a lot of familiar faces, some people she knows through Laura, others she sees all the time, standing around outside the Bird’s Nest, or drinking Flat Whites in Kwofee or at pop-up exhibitions in the Deli opposite the station, but dare not speak to yet, sure they are too smart for her. Lewis skulks around at the back of the room waiting for Laura, her hood up looking scowly, feeling excited, awkward, enthused, ashamed, exposed.
She wants to go on the Demo, but she has promised her mum she will be back in the flat at 10.00 to relieve Joolzy of his Lee-sitting responsibilities. I will be home safe and sound; no I won’t sneak out later, just go, go.
At one of the meetings she went to with her mum a few weeks ago they were told 95% of new housing in the area has been sold off-plan, most are still only half built but are already re-selling at a profit, as, Sissy tells her, most of the new property in South London is now, not just the in-construction but the unbuilt too, projects launching and coming on-stream two, five, ten years into the future, the deeds on these future revenue streams, rents, assets, already changing hands, getting sold on and traded a decade before they are even built, added to the balance sheet today, used to leverage up and speculate further. The streets are thick with the unbuilt, a palimpsest of phantom tower blocks, projects, citadels overlaying the bricks and bone almost real enough to see, to touch. Who knows if any of these spectral houses will ever arrive, be concretised? And yet the prospect is already enriching those smart enough to know how the game is played, the only game in town.
This is where the next collapse will come from, Dan said to her as they stood down in Greenwich one day, sharing a footlong Jalapeno Chicken Satay Tikka Melt from Subway, looking over the Thames to the
HSBC
tower’s blinking light. All those promises, expectations, deals made and remade, bets taken again and again, and Lewis could sense, licking tangy orange sauce from her fingers, a sudden shift in the light, static gusting through the damp air, the penumbra of a storm. All this intangible, invisible power in a vast involute roiling, centrifugal, centripetal, everything rising and falling to its mad, multidimensional rhythms.
She closed her eyes, tried to picture it, the virtual space where all this was determined, some space outside time in which future worlds were winking in and out of existence.
She grew dizzy. Imagine the ungraspable expanse of deep time at your back, the accelerating subdivision of the moment, the vast, flat, stacked, maze-like barrage of futures made and unmade before your eyes at nanosecond speed, too fast to record on anything but a subconscious, cellular level, a nausea, a vertigo, a trauma. She squatted down overwhelmed. Peered between the gaps in the flat steel handrail.
Careful Lewis, careful. That’s how they want you to feel. Defeated, dazed, staggering blind and lost. Careful Lewis, careful, don’t do their work for them. She burps into the neck of her hoody. Maybe just that Subway footlong messing with her brain, she dodges junk food usually. Yes. If the world can be made one way it can be unmade, if it can be driven in one direction, it can be wrested and wrestled back another. Another burp, feels a bit better. Lighter.
She stands up again, that age-old question throbbing softly in her seventeen year old head and heart: To whom does the world belong?
Joolzy is over there, he’s popped out and she nods hello, he touches his forehead back in salute,
alright soldier?
She wanders about looking at the paintings, picking up fliers, fiddling with her phone. Laura assures her she is on her way. People around her are talking, saying many things she doesn’t understand or half understands, but she knows, of course, there are some idiots everywhere, everyone acknowledges that, but these are the people, these are the people among whom she belongs. She skulks and eavesdrops, swigs nervously at a carton of black coffee.