The Carhullan Army (4 page)

We had protested. We’d travelled to London and rallied at Parliament; the crowds were so large people were crushed and the gathering was broken up with tear gas. The troops continued to be dispatched. Every day along the pipelines soldiers were blown apart. More were sent. Andrew said it would probably go on for years, and if he were called up to serve he would refuse. If we had known what was coming we would have left the country then. Though I don’t know where we would have gone.

As I ate fish out of the can in the abandoned village, I remembered us sitting on the Beacon Hill. The dark red of Andrew’s hair had caught the final rays of sunlight. His head had blazed as he talked and his eyes were alight with frustration. It was the night the prime minister had made his final address and stepped down. Within a year of taking office the Forward Party had split, and from the ashes of its new image old doctrines had risen. But something was different, I knew, something was terribly wrong. There was a feeling of unsettlement around the town, as if the world was turning quicker on its axis, as if it was slightly out of control. Andrew’s brow was furrowed. He looked like a man twice his age. ‘They’ve signed us up for dependency and bankruptcy,’ he said, tossing a stone hard into the air and watching it fall towards the bushes on the slopes. ‘And now Powell’s got control of the party there’s no way out. The man is dangerous. He’s one of the old guard. He’s power hungry, and he’s a bigot.’

Back then he had seemed unafraid, undaunted by the gravity of approaching disaster, even when the market crashed, businesses began to go bust, and jobs were lost, even as the country began to stagger towards collapse. I would listen to him seethe about all that was going on, and his fury was almost tactile, almost mine. I was young. I looked to him for reason, for a voice. He bristled at each new measure the government put in place, blamed them for everything: the widening of the conflict abroad, the new fronts in China and Venezuela, the ruthlessness of the banks, blackouts, deportations, empty supermarkets, and hospital closures. He resented the extreme measures put in place to administer the crisis. The ten-year recovery plan was just a contrivance to keep people in check, he said, and decoy their attention. Most of all he hated the creation of the military police force. It was un-British. The Authority was an affront to the rights of the public.

When the general elections were suspended, all hell broke loose. He told me to stay home, and went out on the street with a group of local men. He threw rocks at council windows, surged up towards the civic offices in the castle, and took a riot stick in his lower back. The monitors fired live rounds into the crowd. Five people were killed. It was the same in the other towns and cities. Nobody stood a chance.

Andrew came home and peeled off his shirt so I could see the lesion. I remember putting my fingers gently on the soft red welt. There were bubbles of blood trapped under the skin. It looked as if some creature from the sea had stung him. For the first time his eyes were despairing. ‘I think this is it,’ he said. ‘There’s no going back from this.’ I could hardly believe it. The awful truth was upon us; things were breaking down, completely, irreparably; all the freedoms we had known were being revoked, and nothing could be done to stop it.

That night we were full of angry passion, and reckless. Andrew winced through the sex, asking me to make him hard again and again with my hands and my mouth. We didn’t use the issued contraceptives, though we knew what would happen if I conceived. Maybe it was the only protest left for us. The next morning we decided to get married, to secure ourselves as best we could. We were a good unit. We could care for each other. The laws were changing quickly. Our rights were slipping away and there was no telling where it would end.

We made our quarter in the old terraced house in Rith as comfortable as possible. There was nothing to decorate with and no furnishing to buy. But I hung the pictures I had kept since college and put the quilt my mother had bought for her own wedding on the bed. We were given work papers and placements, he at the refinery, me at New Fuel. We made the best of it.

When I received notification of my appointment at the hospital, Andrew was kind, as sympathetic as he could be, saying it was completely unfair and that he was sure it would only be temporary. I cancelled twice, citing ill health. The third letter came with a red stamp on the envelope. It was delivered by a monitor. I recognised him. We had been at the same school. His name was Tye and he’d been captain of the football team. He was dressed in the dark blue collarless uniform of the Authority. He held the document out to me and said nothing.

Six weeks later I walked to the hospital in Rith and went in to be fitted. In reception I was fingerprinted and handed a thick cotton gown. I waited in a room with twelve other women of varying age. The youngest was about sixteen. She looked terrified, and every few seconds she sniffed and rubbed her nose. I wondered if she had even had sex yet. Nobody spoke. A nurse came in and quickly explained what would happen to us. She held up a model of the device. It was made of copper and was about the size of a matchstick. Two threads ran from it. She pointed to these and said they were longer than those of the original coils, so that the vaginal checks we would undergo to see whether they were still in place could be made more easily, and not necessarily at the clinic. I didn’t understand then what she meant. It was only later I found out the Authority was making random examinations; that women were sometimes asked to display themselves to the monitors in the backs of cruisers.

The nurse clenched her fist around the coil to signify a womb, and she smiled at us. We could all expect heavier periods after insertion, she said, and perhaps a fraction more pain. But really it was nothing to worry about. She left the room. A few moments later my name was called. A couple of the other women looked at me as I stood up, as if my face would set the tone for each of their own experiences. The procedure took ten minutes. It was a male doctor that came into the surgery, fingering into his gloves, and I asked if I could have a woman doctor instead but he said there was no one else available. I lay back on the creased paper sheet, wishing I had taken a painkiller that morning as those I knew who had already been fitted had recommended.

Afterwards I came back to the quarter, nauseous and cramping. The sensation of pressure at the neck of my cervix remained for the whole afternoon. I tried not to dwell on it but I felt awful. My nails kept digging into my palms and I had to shake my hands every few minutes to relax them.

Andrew was rostered at work until the evening, so I sat in the yard in the muggy sun. There was a strong UV warning but I didn’t care. All I could think about was the doctor who had rubbed cool lubricant inside me, inserting the speculum and attaching the device as efficiently as a farmer clipping the ear of one of his herd.

I looked at the plastic pots in which I had tried to grow courgettes and beans the summer before. They hadn’t sprouted, and in places the soil looked interfered with, as if it had been dug out by an animal. I had seen rats from the upper windows, scurrying the length of the wall. By the end of the afternoon the yard was full of shadows. I wished again we had signed up for an allotment, or had been placed in a house with a proper garden, but the waiting list was now so long and there were so few of them available to civilians that it seemed hopeless.

When Andrew arrived back he asked me if I was OK and if he could see it. We went inside, shut the door to our section of the building and I took down my trousers. I sat on the bed and he gently opened my legs. Everything felt inflamed. I had cleaned myself up with a towel after the procedure but the water would not be hot enough to wash properly until later that night. There was still some translucent medical jelly there. It glistened and felt almost unbearably slippery as Andrew ran his thumb over me. ‘How does it feel?’ he asked me again. ‘Is it uncomfortable?’ He was kneeling in front of me. I shrugged, shook my head and looked away. ‘You’re still you,’ he said. ‘Beautiful you. They can’t control that, can they?’ His thumb was rubbing me gently. I wanted to ask him to stop, it had been too traumatic, and there was still some blood, but neither one of us had ever said no to the other.

I felt him slip his middle finger inside me. He meant to do it slowly and carefully but the lubricant made his movement easy, and I heard him murmur a noise of surprise and arousal. My eyes were closed. ‘Is that nice?’ he asked me. There was the small wet sound of him drawing out and pushing his fingers in again.

His breathing changed, became thicker. ‘God. I’m sorry, I just want to be inside you,’ he said. ‘Can I? Will it make you forget it maybe? Come on. It’ll be just us.’ He leant forward to kiss me and unzipped his jeans. ‘Here, you,’ he said. He took my hand and put it to his groin. He was hard and as I gripped him I felt the blood straining underneath his tightened skin. He moved forward a little on his knees.

At the clinic we had been advised by the nurse to wait twenty-four hours. But after the hands of the doctor and the sharp bite of the tubing, any prohibition now seemed pointless. ‘Oh, God, yeah,’ he whispered as I pushed him inside, ‘it’s so wet.’ I could see in his face, the degree by which he felt the sensation more than usual. His mouth was open and his eyes seemed unfocused, with a pleading look.

As if still afraid it would be painful for me he didn’t move much, but there was a deep rawness to it all. He came quickly, and with more intensity than he ever had. As he pulled out I felt the warm fluid escaping onto my thighs. He held on to me, breathing hard, then his body jerked as if he was coming again. He put his thumb to me and began to rub, but I told him not to.

When the power came on he ran a bath for me and told the family in the room next door I would need a bit longer than usual. ‘Tough day,’ I heard him telling them. ‘She’s been at the clinic.’ For the rest of the night he was attentive, treating me with kindness, and he seemed happier than he had in months. It wasn’t to last.

The conditions were hard on all of us. Life changed in every way and it was difficult to adjust. There was despondency and resentment, food shortages, humiliations. Any small feeling of bliss, any cheap narcotic substance available to mask the difficulty, to make people forget what they once had, was easily sold. In the poorest quarters people took low-grade drugs, ketamine, and hits of silverflex, which rotted their jaws. They passed syphilis among themselves and the clinics cut tumours from the genitals of those who abused the animal tranquillisers for too long. There was almost no money, and what little there was seemed meaningless. People traded with their bodies, their possessions, they signed up for futurised loans.

This was not England, everyone said. This was some nightmarish version that we would wake from soon. The overdose and suicide rates climbed. Each time another occurred in Rith, and was talked about at the factories and plants, Andrew and I walked up the Beacon and held hands. It wouldn’t be us, we said. We were stronger. We’d come through OK.

But over the years I saw Andrew become weary and practical, reduced to the base mechanism of getting by. Or perhaps he simply lost faith and the energy to resist, realising how close we had all come to something far worse than the critical existence left to us. As time went by he became less outspoken. He no longer seemed lit by anger when talking about the recovery’s directives. Perhaps the government had done the only thing it could have to keep the country from breaking apart, he said, and I began to wonder what that early version of him had really consisted of. Meetings of opposition in the packed terraced houses concerned rather than excited him. The speakers were frauds and fantasists, he said, with no sense of financial solution, only contrary ideas and gripes. He didn’t want to get sick being around all those germs. He began not to attend. Instead he visited the bar near the castle, where the off-duty monitors drank.

He went to work, slept soundly through the night and reached for me in the mornings. Sex was one of the few remaining pleasures, he said; it was nice to feel me without any barriers. He ate the cubes of meat and fruit, from the shipments of tins sent from America, without complaint. After a while he began not to take small ritualistic pleasure in burning their labels in the old cast-iron fireplace of our quarter, as we had once done together. When he was promoted to overseer at the refinery he seemed grateful, and told me it was madness to be anything other than complicit in Britain’s attempts to rebuild herself. Once stability returned, so too would the freedoms we had lost. ‘We can be bitter,’ he said, ‘or we can just get on with it.’

When he’d said this I’d bitten my lip, and then turned to face him. Out of a deep place in me I’d felt my fury rise. ‘She’s a female, is she, this country that’s been fucked over?’ The cup I had been holding left my hand and I heard it explode with brittle force against the wall. He ducked, his eyes clenched shut, as the fragments showered him. Before he could recover from the shock, or answer, I had left the room, slamming the door behind me.

For months we bickered and sulked. Our conversations began to fail on even the smallest of levels. Who had not written
tea
on the monthly provisions list. Who had eaten the last vitamin tablet, the last omega supplement. Who didn’t understand the importance of this principle, or that political necessity. I knew he saw me as stubborn and naive, too upset to become empowered again. In bed he tried to negotiate, and have us agree physically, as if this would be the way we could still function together, as if I could separate my mind from my body and he could continue to communicate with one if not the other. ‘We could ask for anti-depressants,’ he said. ‘There are some coming over from America now and I could maybe swing something at work to pay for it.’

But he must have known at heart that I was not depressed. He must have known it was more than a simple chemical response to the ongoing situation. Mine was a different kind of sickness. I didn’t feel listless or oppressed. I didn’t want drugs or numbness to mask my consciousness. I knew that everything around me was wrong. I could see it. I could sense it. And I had not yet found a voice with which to make my arguments. It still lay somewhere inside me, unexpressed, growing angrier.