Chalcot Crescent (11 page)

Surely ‘they’ will not leave me standing in the street. And, as I say, some miracle might happen. It always has in the past – a musical made of one of my old books, the reissue of a DVD, a film, an archive bought – unexpected money in the bank, debts paid, and everything back to normal. Well, normal as far as that exists today, but at least, like old Barbara fifty years ago, permitted by the State to stay in this house until I die. I’m glad we went to her funeral and I don’t think her soul went into Polly. But perhaps it did. She must have been rather angry the other side of her apparent patience, as she shuffled past our chattering dinner parties on her way to make a piece of cheese on toast, too uninteresting even to be addressed as ‘the sitting tenant’, which I, up to my eyes in mortgage, in effect now am. The biter bit, and serves me right.

Anyway, that is the story of the Crescent until now. I am a little worried about Amos’ assumption that ‘we’ will smuggle my belongings to a place of safety and thus defraud the State. I have lived all my life as a decent citizen, a payer of taxes, a giver to charity – my banker’s order to Oxfam now goes automatically to the CiviKindness people – but I can see perhaps none of that good behaviour has helped me very much in life. I must somehow find my inner bitch.

But here and now is good. I slept surprisingly well. Amos stayed the night, and in the morning seemed totally normal and offered to bring me breakfast in bed and I accepted with gratitude. I often stay in bed to write until the need for coffee becomes too great to resist – especially when Venetia has slipped me some of the real stuff from the CiviStore. After that my concentration fades and it can be hours before I return to my laptop. But this morning I got a whole lot of writing done, with nice warm toes, before Amos called that breakfast was ready. During which time I was able to fill you in very adequately on recent economic history and the rise and fall of house prices, though I daresay I lost a few readers.

Amos spent a lot of time on his mobile rather than cooking, and then it took him ten minutes to find the dried egg. He seemed to take the difficulty personally, and I wondered if his unknown father had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder: my side of the family being too casual and laid-back to have provided the genes which make people panicky if what they are looking for cannot be found at once. I had to get out of bed to help him to find it.

Scrambled egg using dried egg is perfectly palatable, though better if you can get hold of blue-top milk to add to the mix, and not the green-top which is more readily available. In fact I quite like
dried-egg scramble, if enough time and trouble is taken squashing out the lumps.

Dried egg is once again imported from the USA: in return for our oats, as a kind of simple barter, while the international money systems wait for what is hopefully referred to as ‘the restoration of financial harmony’. I reckoned this would be a long time coming: natural calamity had piled on quantitative easement to intensify both food and water shortages and continued financial chaos. On the heels of the UG99 ravages, a new strain of resistant fusarium fungus meant cereal harvests failed over the American and Russian continents in 2011–12; but at least both were spared the avian flu, which got China in a big way; a new strain of dengue fever, resistant to antibiotics, swept Africa. Most air travel now is restricted to diplomats and government officials, and everyone who sets foot on foreign soil is well fumigated the instant they arrive. This puts most tourists off: that, and the currency restrictions. Here in the UK it’s £5 for every trip abroad, the same as it was in 1948. Even after the Devaluation that’s the same as saying ‘Just Stay Home’. No-one forbids anyone to do anything: people just know they need to be socially responsible.

America sends out its surplus eggs, China sends out its surplus milk, we have a few oats over after the needs of our own sixty million are met. Oats are a hardy crop. I say sixty million but some say at least five million have vanished off the radar over the last five years, a great chunk of them our own citizens: flotillas of little boats are said to radiate out from our coves and beaches. A Dunkirk in reverse. Government doesn’t tell us, and if it did, would we believe them? Anyway, there seem to be more than enough people about, of all skin shades and divergent cultures, and just about enough food, water, warmth and power to get by.

‘Only dried fucking egg,’ says Amos. I explain I like dried eggs. They used to cheer me up in the austerity years after the war when we first came to England. They were a bright, bright yellow – still are – and a contrast to everything else in the country, which seemed to me as a twelve-year-old to have been dipped wholesale into some great vat of grey dye. Now of course one wonders if the hens have been fed on tartrazine to buck the yolk colour up artificially: then such suspicions never occurred to one. He asks me if I want to get up to eat or do I really want to eat in bed. I say I’ll get up to save getting crumbs everywhere.

I asked Amos who he’d been talking to on the phone and he said his brother Ethan, and I said that was nice, would they be getting together later? And he said yes, and a few friends, and I asked if Mervyn was coming too, and Amos said no. Mervyn was not ‘in sympathy’. I wondered what that meant and Amos said ‘Oh, never mind. Waste of fucking time.’ So I asked how many friends. And Amos said eight. Which seemed rather a lot. Eight, other than for a dinner party, constituted a meeting. Something else occurred to me, and I asked if Amy would be coming over too. ‘She’s fucking got to come,’ said Amos. ‘She’s the life and soul of the party. It’s her project.’

Oh yes. ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Party,’ sprang to my mind unbidden. That was what people used to write when trying out new pens on scraps of paper in shops. The party was the Communist Party, party of literate intellectuals worldwide in the middle years of the twentieth century. That was how the tradition of writing it had arrived, that and ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, for the more sensible reason that it contained all the letters of the alphabet. But still ‘the Party’. Life and soul of what Party?

‘You’ll be wanting to get on with your memoir, I suppose,’ Amos said now. ‘We’ll be upstairs. Don’t worry about it.’

In other words you are not wanted at this meeting. And I know well enough that when the young say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ it means you had better do so.

‘We’ll bring our own coffee,’ he says. Coffee! A likely tale. Just as over the post-war years powdered instant coffee had come to be known as simply coffee, so now had the powdered chicory and roasted oats version of today. But it wasn’t coffee as I once knew it.

With everything Amos said my unease grew. Ethan but not Mervyn? What did that signify? Ethan had settled in so easily to his new life: perhaps too easily. Amos, and his feeling of not belonging, a reject, feeling morally superior to those who lay down the ethical rules. The sign of the agitator. Ethan, converted by his big brother, the Redpeace activist, the sleeper, unsubscribing, cutting the ties in order to penetrate government, pretending to like what actually he hated and resented. This was indeed paranoia. Mervyn, the younger sibling, placatory, not wanting to get involved, or raise his head above the parapet. What poison was filtering through to their lives? Worst of all now, Amy, child of the patricide, back from the past to haunt us all.

‘What exactly is the project?’ I asked lightly. ‘Blowing up the Cabinet?’

Amos did not laugh in return: he just pretended he didn’t hear. Idealists and political romantics don’t do much laughing, and only hear what they want to hear. Amy, life and soul of the party. Did she go with Ethan or Amos? I hoped Amos, Ethan being better able to look after himself, relationship-wise. But that was a stupid, passing thought: my generation was showing: any sensible person would simply want Amy out of the way. Because that would be the way
my particular cookie crumbled. First Terry, whom I stole, then Liddy, then Cynthia who died as punishment, then Florrie, now Amy come to destroy my grandchild, and all because I slept with Terry when I should not have done. It was gross disloyalty to a friend.

‘It’s a Redpeace meeting,’ he said. ‘She’s an area organizer.’

Well, there you are. Cookie crumbled.

Redpeace is not so much a movement as a cult, the fundamentalist spawn of Greenpeace. It is not a banned organization. It is against cruelty to animals, and is all for protectionism, free speech and the liberalization of the drug laws, in all of which policies it is in accord with NUG. It is also against human genetic engineering – an issue on which NUG are not partisan. So far so good. Myself, I rather doubt NUG’s espousal of free speech; the fact is that there are certain words that cannot be said – anything fat-ist, ageist, racist, sexist, or élitist – and certain concepts that must be espoused – all are born equal, for example, that nature means nothing and nurture everything; that there is no inheritable factor in IQ scores; that to be ‘middle class’ is an act of will (and a reprehensible one), not like prosperity itself, more often than not a function of IQ; that so long as the motive is pure the ends justify the means – and only by co-operation and pooling resources under
dirigiste
rule (while of course preserving democracy) will the nation climb out of the pit the politicians of the past dug for us. I take care not to voice my doubts too loudly.

Greenpeace in the meanwhile has dissolved itself. The various ecology groups came together during the Recovery Years, and, in the same mood as did the charities, united to form a master organization, CiviGaia, the better to focus and express positive community and ecological indignation. Actual physical protest – marching
round with placards – was seen as laughable. Other than on Pull Together Day, when everyone came out into the streets for carnivals, best banner competitions, local tugs-of-war, and free street barbecues. A few minor groups like Redpeace were allowed to stick it out on their own – it is ostensibly against NUG’s policy to ban anything or anyone – but began to seem mildly ridiculous and ineffective. Walk through the streets with a banner when it wasn’t Pull Together Day and the children would hurl their shoes. And their mothers would have to run round picking them up and swearing at the protestors.

Ethan, when he was angry and miserable at being made redundant, had joined Redpeace for a time, as I have told you, but soon realized he was keeping the company of conspiracy theorists and losers in general, and had got out. But now I rather wondered whether he had. Didn’t people go underground?

Surely this must be paranoia. I was leaping ahead of myself, dissolving into the fiction around which I had built so much of my life. Amy’s ‘project’ was as likely to be finally giving in and joining up to CiviGaia as anything else. Which would be the reason Ethan was coming along. Or perhaps Ethan was ‘with’ Amy. The boys would do nothing to harm their poor old gran: it would not only be unkind, also impractical. My house was already under surveillance, and though Amos said the bailiffs would not be back for years, how could he be sure? But as Amos himself had pointed out, and I believed him, all agencies are one (fucking) agency. Security and financial breaches were now seen as associated threats: social irresponsibility putting the State at hazard.

‘Negative thinking’ has joined a list of other punishable hate crimes.
Smile and the World Smiles with You
currently goes up on posters all over London, and our exported oats are shipped in
hessian sacks with red smileys printed all over them. I expect a piece of research has come out maintaining that good cheer increases productivity in the same spirit as farmers swear that playing Mozart to cows increases their milk yield.

On the whole I devote mornings to writing my memoir, and afternoons to a strange kind of fictional fantasy, in which I write my account of what may, or may not, be going on in my children’s households. The publishing industry is at the end of its tether, and is reluctant to publish any books at all. Readers have gone off the misery memoir, and want accounts of heroism and good cheer, of the kind Samuel Smiles delivered to the public with
Self-Help
, in 1859. Samuel Smiles –
Self-Help
! How could such a title and such a name not sell to the populace? In the same way as my grandfather Edgar Jepson increased bread sales no end in the First World War with his advertising slogan
Eat More Bread!
Simplicity works. The theory being that if you ate more bread you would eat less meat. Which is why the National Unity Government, or NUG (slogan:
Hug the NUG!
), had contrived that the National Meat Loaf has a lot of oats in it and not much meat. It has a rather haggis-like consistency but it’s okay. My teeth are not too bad for their age; they look all right on the outside – in the days of my wealth I had very expensive veneers done, which will certainly outlast me, no matter what happens to the yellowing teeth behind them.

There were other Smiles books –
Character, Thrift, Duty
. O Samuel Smiles, thy country needs thee now!

‘Gran, where did you get the blue-top milk from?’

‘From your mother. She gets it from the CiviStore on Victor’s card.’

Time was when low-fat green-top was all the rage. But the passion for skinniness has altogether abated. The fatter you are, the warmer you can keep. NUG is building up the dairy herds once again, as the nation strives for self-sufficiency in food – forget dangerous methane-emitting ruminants – we’re hungry – and if we don’t eat, and we don’t have jobs, we riot and burn things down and frighten politicians so much they up and go away, no doubt taking their ill-gotten gains with them, leaving us the poorer, and searching for another leader. After NUG was elected the cult of personality simply evaporated; no statues, no public appearances, just the occasional decree in NUGNews and an illegible signature. But goodies for the
nomenklatura
, and scrapings for the rest, same as always.

‘Well, she bloody well would, wouldn’t she,’ said Amos, and of all the things he had said lately this was the one that struck home. I realized this was a son who did not love his mother, and I felt my blood run cold. And when I say that I mean it. It was as if the stuff no longer ran merrily through my heart, but sluggishly, and thickly, and I felt a chill follow the arteries as it ran through my body.