If Then (6 page)

He came to the shelf where normally he would find his transparent box of goods and tasks. But the shelf was empty. No box for Hector, and no box for James. He stared numbly at the absence, then looked on the shelves above and below, and around the back. Not an oversight, not an accidental omission, but part of a forming pattern. A pattern of absences, hollowing him out.

5

T
he caretaker
and his team cleared away the remnants of market day, shovelling up rind and manure, their breath steaming with the exertion of the work. The caretaker chivvied on his work gang, and then, catching sight of James and Hector on the opposite pavement, bobbed his yeoman’s head deferentially, his stripe visible through his hair’s thinning ranks.

“Where are you off to, bailiff?”

“On my way to the moot to get my orders, Terry.”

Terry appreciated his pragmatism.

“You do what you have to do.”

Terry took a tobacco pouch from his dungarees and rolled himself a cigarette, picking out bits of leaf. He licked the papers and raised his eyebrows at Hector.

“How is the stretcher bearer working out?”

James put his arm around Hector and brought him close.

“You were in the army, Terry. What do you think?”

Terry shook his head. “They were brave lads, the stretcher bearers. They went under fire to get the wounded out of the front line and back to the aid post. But as to what he’s doing here, it’s well beyond me.”

Terry took them to the top of a twitten, one of the narrow steep alleyways twisting inside the town, secretive trenches of flint and brick walls. From this elevated aspect, he pointed a few miles south, beyond the old road and the floodplain, drawing their gaze to a distant stream of smoke rising from two thin chimneys in Newhaven.

“Another new factory, and it’s been running day and night these last three weeks.”

“I saw it from Firle Beacon.”

“Who’s out there?”

“No one as far as I know. I evicted them all. It’s the Process.”

Terry shook his head at the prospect and lit his cigarette. The tobacco smelt faintly of bourbon, the smoke a bluish speech balloon in the cold air. Terry had talked about his tobacco plants many times, how he grew them in the shed, cropped the leaves before first frost, pressed them with house bricks, shredded the compact lump with a kitchen knife then dried the long hairy strands to his own particular taste.

“If you’d have told me that this is how I was going to spend the rest of my days…” Terry didn’t finish the thought, out of superstition. People had grown superstitious about complaining. In the aftermath of the Seizure, complaining was socially unacceptable, an indication, James felt, that the town was maturing. Whinging was a symptom of powerlessness, and within the Process everyone mattered, everyone had a role to play.

The stretcher bearer reached out and took Terry’s tobacco pouch from his top pocket. The men watched as Hector casually peeled out a paper, lay a hairy trail of homegrown tobacco upon it, then rolled and licked the cigarette tight in one quick movement. Terry lit a match for the soldier, the quick flame echoing off the flint walls. Hector, cigarette between his lips, closed his eyes in bliss. He smoked quietly and withdrawn, the whites of his eyes fierce in sunken orbits. Terry went to speak but James hushed him: this was new behaviour. The act of smoking produced an expression akin to contemplation. Hector joined them in gazing across the night to the distant factory.

“Being high up makes the signal stronger,” guessed Terry. “Have you tried taking him to the top of the castle?”

They crossed the high street and passed through the gatehouse. Hector overtook Terry at a jog. With athletic verve, he leapt over the dry-stone wall onto the hallowed grass of the bowling green. The way he walked and smoked, his cocky manner in looking back at Terry and James, was that of a young man in his early twenties; his walk changed from the exhausted trudge of the trench rat to a deliberate Indian step, in which each foot was placed, toe first, upon the earth.

The bowling green was three hundred years old, the dip and rise of its turf an echo of the waveform of the Downs. Hector found a spot and sat down cross-legged.

James climbed over a low wall and Terry followed.

“Hector…” began James.

Hector opened his eyes and said, “I will not fight.”

James crouched close to the soldier’s sharp features. “Fight who?”

The stretcher bearer spoke in earnest to surrounding phantoms, as if he addressed the Process itself.

“I will not fight,” Hector said with conviction. “But I will serve.”

“Who will you serve?”

“I will serve this land but not your country, I will serve the people but not their rulers.” He finished smoking his cigarette. “I am not afraid of anything and I will not fight.”

Terry took off his jacket and lay it across Hector’s narrow shoulders. “The lad’s a pacifist.”

“Why is he in uniform, then?”

“Some of the conchies were sent to the front as stretcher bearers.”

“It doesn’t sound like he was sent to fight. More like he volunteered.”

“It makes no sense.” A note of anger in Terry’s voice. “Why, when we’re all on the bones of our backside, build something as complicated as a man? It’s not like we’re short of people.”

“Careful,” said James.

Terry turned away, and kicked at the turf, composing himself with a couple of brisk pulls on his cigarette.

“It’s not a crime to ask why. I don’t complain. I do my tasks. But this way of life will end, just like the old ways ended. A government will take us back, and want a reckoning. If we go too far, then we won’t be able to come back.”

He wondered if there could ever be a reckoning for what had happened during the Seizure. For what he had done. Or rather, for what had been done through him. Evictions, theft, violence. The implant made him into an instrument of the Process. He had wanted to ask Ruth if the people were afraid of him. If she was afraid of him.

Oblique winter sunlight filled the narrow main street. The silhouettes of prison chimneys against the darkening Western Downs. To the east, the night advanced over the ditches and burial mounds of Mount Caburn. The town huddled within the lie of the land.

Hector finished his cigarette and was silent. They waited for him to speak again but he did not. James pulled the stretcher bearer to his feet. Terry asked the questions that had been bothering him: what did the arrival of the soldier mean? Were there more soldiers to come? Would he be evicted?

“There will be answers,” said James. “But there may not be answers for us.”

The moot was in the Town Hall. Terry left them at the door. It was no place for the likes of him. James led the way by candlelight, down dark, damp corridors, Hector padding behind, their approach sending mice skittering back into the skirting boards.

They came into a gaslit room where a few men and women, the ombudsmen of the estates of Lewes, were whispering as they waited for the evictions to be announced. The ombudsmen were dressed in their district colours: a burly biker from Cliffe in a black and white neckerchief; a former office worker from Southover in red and black stripes with a smuggler’s hooped earring, a sign that with the Seizure the man had returned to undergraduate ways; an elderly couple in red military tunics who spoke with the confident enunciation of barristers, and so on, through each of the seven districts of Lewes. Individual names drifted in and out of James’ recollection; some days he woke up in Lewes and could not remember the name of anyone in the town. The ombudsmen were reluctantly deferential to him, muttering “bailiff” as he walked through the room. He did not acknowledge them. He noted the prickling suspicion and resentment the ombudsmen showed toward Hector, then closed the wooden doors behind him.

Edith Von Pallandt convened the moot with rote phrases.

“Nothing is decided in this council. This moot exists solely for us to bear witness to the unfolding of the Process and to share our experiences.” The introduction complete, Edith peered over the edge of her half-moon glasses at the bailiff and Hector. With remission, her hair had returned in long curls, and she had dyed it with a preparation of henna and indigo. Her nose and chin were strong, her eyes motherly and turned down at the ends. She was not a leader, she would explain, if asked to perform as one; rather she was a catalyst, or a conduit.

The meeting opened with a polite discussion of the latest allocation, the orderly manner of its passing, the usual suspects who had dared to appear dissatisfied with their lot. Joe, the doctor, spoke about the health of the town, the status of the sick, the number of the dead and the newborn. The death rate – after an initial spike during the Seizure – had bottomed out and the health of the town markedly improved.

Joe, bald and youthful, explained, “I don’t know whether it is due to the medicine that the Process manufactures, or the more active lifestyle of the town, or even a consequence of closer community bonds, but we don’t see the same incidence of physical or mental illness as before. Take our rehousing of young families in the larger houses of older residents; the drop in depression among the over-65s directly correlates to that policy. Before the Seizure, most of my pensioners were on antidepressants. Not anymore. The community life is like a placebo. It has a positive effect but we don’t know exactly how or why. I suspect that if we could extract the nature of this benefit from the Process it would change how we organize societies.”

“So this is a sane town,” said Edith.

The doctor could not tell if she was summarizing his conclusions or questioning them. “It is a healthy town,” he replied. This pronouncement caused him discomfort, and when the attention of the others moved on, James saw a twinge of shame on the doctor’s face.

“Is the sanity confined to Lewes?” This question came from the head of schools, Carla. The dark, sallow indentations beneath her eyes were a contrast to the doctor’s clean-shaven vigour.

“It’s a difficult comparison to make,” said Alex Drown. The receiving of the eviction list required her expertise. She had showered and brushed her hair into a boyish swept-aside fringe.

“The value of the data grown here far exceeds that of the rest of the country. Lewesians are so minutely observed, known so deeply and broadly by the Process, that crude categorizations such as nationality no longer hold sway.”

“Meaning?” asked Joe.

“Meaning that in the rest of the country the government organizations that used to collect this kind of data are gone, and that ways of storing and analyzing that data are compromised,” continued Alex. “The digital datasphere is polluted and, while some digital networks thrive in quarantine, any attempt to make them open and free again brings about undesirable outcomes: all noise, no signal. As my colleagues are fond of pointing out, these days the cloud is full of thunder but no lightning.”

Joe’s face remained immobile, waiting for clarification.

Alex smiled, “Meaning you won’t be getting the internet back any time soon, if indeed it still exists in the form that we remember it.”

“Has anyone been to London lately?” asked Edith.

James said, “One of the evicted families is working out in Glynde. They came back from London.”

“I like to hear stories of London,” said Edith. “Any news of its misfortunes would reassure me that we made the right decision.”

“A character flaw of yours,” said the baron, stroking the hand of his wife.

“London is too big to fail,” said Alex. “Everything and everyone will be sacrificed to preserve it.”

“If you are looking for trouble, then go north.” This from Angus, the
douanier
, keeper of the border. Angus also had an implant. Both he and James were big genial men who, under the control of the implant, had committed violence on behalf of the community. No guilt and no bias, that was the genius of the system. When James evicted families he was not in control of his actions, and was a mere vessel for the will of the town. When the
douanier
set fire to an encampment that strayed too close to the perimeter, or beat back weeping mothers with their babes in arms, he did so blank-eyed.

“I heard that Middlesbrough failed to reach its reserve price,” said the
douanier.
“They have a month before the deadline and then they’ll be put into special measures.”

The
douanier
picked up news of the outside world from the people who passed by. Radio signals from outside could not penetrate the atmospheric soup of the Process.

“Are we to expect more migrants at the gate?” Edith asked him, although her glance paused pointedly at Hector.

“If it’s a cold spring,” said the
douanier
.

Broad-shouldered and powerfully muscled, the
douanier
was a genteel enforcer; before the Seizure, he had been a silversmith. It was Edith’s idea to call him the
douanier
rather than the town guard, or the man-at-arms, or the bouncer; the gentility of the French word made the act of exclusion appear more refined. An advantage of the implants was that, once the necessary violence had been performed, men like Angus and James returned to their identities as reasonable, biddable citizens. In the afternoons, the
douanier
repaired jewellery, his great strength focused upon tiny acts of beauty.

“People keep coming,” he said, sadly. “We give them sandwiches and send them on their way.”

The baron leant back and nodded sagely. “And if they do not accept the sandwiches, your implant takes over and the Process delivers the necessary force. The Process spares you the moral responsibility of your acts, and spares us from living in fear of you. The quality of people can thrive, whereas in the past we merely cultivated quantity. This is the purpose of the Process.”

Baron Von Pallandt luxuriated in committing this heresy against his long-lost liberalism.

“I don’t think that is the purpose,” said Alex Drown.

“Are you going to lecture me?” The baron appeared amused by the prospect. “You sold us to the Process, you can hardly complain when we take pleasure in it.”

“I don’t object to your evident delight. I just don’t believe in your interpretation of the Process.”

“What insight can the Institute offer us?” replied the baron. Before the Seizure, Edith and the baron had actively prepared for social collapse, had forearmed themselves against it, and been arrested for foretelling it on the streets of London; that they enjoyed being proved so thoroughly right was hard to ignore.