‘Going home!’ said Tom, astonished. ‘She can’t possibly look after herself’
‘That’s not our problem,’ the nurse said coldly. ‘Your aunt’s health is of no concern to us. She’s a suspect and she’s way over the age limit. That’s two strikes. Two strikes and you’re definitely out. She’s not entitled to hospital care.’ Sprouts didn’t lie much, not to suspects. There was no buttering up. Sticking to the plain, unvarnished truth wasn’t something sprouts did because they were honest, or didn’t have anything to hide, but because they didn’t have to worry about suspects knowing things. The truth was that sprouts didn’t worry about anything because only sprouts could punish sprouts and sprouts never punished other sprouts for doing bad things to suspects. Sprouts, even low-grade sprouts, were always assumed to be in the right. Suspects were always in the wrong. Simple. The sprouts were special. And by any measure they were treated as special. They had guaranteed pensions, special health care facilities, special traffic lanes (which weren’t entirely necessary since they were the only people who could afford motor cars or the petrol to put into their tanks), special schools and special everything. The sprouts were a different group. They really had become ‘them’.
Sprouts inherited their jobs, or came by them through family contacts, and they held them for life, living well and comfortably. Although it didn’t appear in any of the treaties or the constitution, it was the first law of the new United States of Europe and it at least made life simple. Everyone knew where they stood, even if they weren’t standing quite where they wanted to stand.
Chapter 3
Tom took his aunt home. Naturally, they made him sign a form taking responsibility for her health and welfare. The sprouts had all the authority but none of the responsibility. He and his wife nursed her back to health; sharing with her the little food they had for themselves.
‘Old age is a shipwreck,’ said his aunt one day. And Tom could see what she meant. Every moment was a crisis. She was constantly fighting to survive amidst the storms, sharks and cannibals of aching joints, fluttering heart and clogged-up piping. ‘If you think life is exhausting when you’re young, you just wait until you’re old,’ his aunt warned him.
But she didn’t want to die. ‘Not ready yet,’ she said firmly. She spent her days watching the Telescreen and looking at old photographs. She often got the two mixed up; confusing the activities of the people she’d seen on the Telescreen and the folk with whom she’d spent the earlier decades of her long life.
Only one channel was available on the Telescreen. All programmes were made, approved and broadcast by the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, known as the BBC. The BBC was EUDCE’s official broadcaster. Most programmes were made in Turkish but all programmes were available in a choice of over thirty languages. All the viewer had to do was set the default on their Telescreen to broadcast in their chosen language.
To get back to the doorbell that didn’t ring.
‘There’s someone here,’ shouted Tom’s aunt. ‘Two someones. They say they’re men from...’ she struggled to remember what she’d been told and then extemporised. ‘Somewhere,’ she said, throwing the word away as though it didn’t really matter where they came from.
‘Did you send them away?’
‘No, dear. They sort of pushed their way in when I answered the door.’ she said. ‘They knocked a lot,’ she added, in explanation. ‘They just kept knocking.’
‘Oh. Where are they?’
‘They’re in the living room reading the cushions.’
Tom was in the bathroom painting a small cupboard he’d found in a jumble sale. He’d bought it with a trowel one of the allotment holders had given him as a tip for helping clear away some weeds. He balanced his paintbrush on top of the pot of paint, wiped his hands down the sides of his faded green corduroy trousers, and sighed. For a simple exhalation there was a lot of emotion in it. Tom was so full of weariness that it spilt out of him at the slightest provocation.
If the visitors were reading the cushions they would be Soft Artefact Label Inspectors. In the wonderful new world of EUDCE every sprout had a grand tide. Lorry drivers had become Supply Chain Solution Executives. Officer clerks had become Logistical Problem Resolution Officers. And scrapyard employees were known as Conclusion of Active Life Vehicle Disassemblement Centre. If there was doubt the sprout would simply be described as a European Agent of Constitutional Enrichment.
A Label Inspector was only a Grade Three sprout but he was still a sprout; an inspector certified by the authorities and endowed with the full power of arrest and deportation. There were always two of them, of course. Like policemen, bailiffs, small children and girls at dances, sprouts invariably travelled in pairs.
Chapter 4
Tom was 61, tall and slim. This was not particularly through choice or healthy eating but more a consequence of the fact that he never had enough to eat. He had lost much of his hair, had large bags under his eyes and, because of the fluoride they’d put in the drinking water, his teeth were grey.
He wore what he nearly always wore, since they were pretty much the only clothes he owned, a pair of green corduroy trousers that were worn and rather shiny and a sports jacket with leather elbow patches.
He was a sensitive, gentle man who was stronger than he looked and stronger than most people who met him imagined him to be. He was that not uncommon variety of Englishman: a traditionalist who respected history but was not afraid to contemplate new ideas, though he embraced only the ones worth embracing; a man who believed in old-fashioned values without being constrained by bigotry. He was in some ways a very ordinary man but at the same time a most unusual man; a radical who hated change but, at the same time, a man who believed in the widely derided standards of Old England. He was that rare creature: a traditionalist who was never afraid to stand up for what he believed; never afraid to rebel. He was a man who put freedom above all else; he was that combination of cavalier and roundhead that only ever occurs in England.
He was old enough to remember the distant days when ordinary folk were treated with respect by policemen and airport security guards. He could remember when rubbish was collected as a regular routine, by workers not too proud to be known as dustmen, and when civil servants were civil rather than patronising, obliging rather than obstructive. He could even remember when the police responded to emergency calls without asking questions about the ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator. He could remember when muggers and thieves kept to the shadows. (These days the streets were considered so dangerous that one television pundit, sponsored by a failing chain of hamburger restaurants, had suggested that parents should deliberately allow their children to become fat, on the grounds that children who were well-padded with fatty deposits would be less vulnerable to knife attacks.)
Like most male adult suspects Tom wore a beard. The shortage of both water and heat made shaving impractical. Tom, like most of the people he knew, fetched his allocated daily water supply from a standpipe which was turned on for just an hour a day. Hot water, like central heating, was an almost forgotten luxury.
In different times he had worked as a publishing editor. One of his last authors, a reality television star famous mainly for her mammoth, if artificial, bosom had been made a Dame and awarded a Nobel Prize for exceptional services to literature as a result of a series of twelve ghost written autobiographies, all published before her 30th birthday. But the rise of the Internet, the success of what had at the time been known as Google in putting books free onto the Internet and the widespread availability of e-books and authorised free blogs meant that people had stopped buying books. Why bother? Books were too long for most people anyway. Just words, words and more words. No one had read much more than a twitter for years.
As a result Tom, along with printers, bookstores and authors had become just about as employable as a Nazi memorabilia salesman.
He hated the Internet.
Not particularly because it had cost him his job. It had don
e far more than that. It had destroyed respect for learning, and had destroyed the integrity and honesty of earning. The reliance of web providers on advertising meant that education and scholarship had been taken over by commercial interests. He’d been appalled when a famous breakfast cereal manufacturer had started giving away GCSE certificates with its individually packed products.
‘What have you got?’ a child would ask, removing a small scroll from the bottom of the packet.
‘Arabic,’ his brother or sister might reply, doing the same thing. ‘That’s nine I’ve got.’
The enthusiasm for free this, free that and free everything else had done what the philistines had never been able to do.
And in the end the governments had taken over the Internet and had learned to control what appeared; to manipulate the content and to suppress the dangerously questioning. It had, for those who had taken the power to themselves, been so very easy.
In the dark and privacy of the night, Tom still dreamt of days when authors and publishers produced daring, iconoclastic books which questioned and undermined the establishment. He had long ago learned that the pen is only mightier than the sword (or the taser) when the person you are facing doesn’t actually hold a sword (or a taser) in his hand. He had learned that the pen in the hand of the advertisement buyer writing a cheque is more powerful than the pen in the hand of any independent writer.
Moreover, he no longer believed that most people wanted to know the truth. ‘There’s what people want to believe,’ he had once said, ‘there’s what people want to hear. And then there is the truth.’
He knew that everyone’s future is built upon the relics of their past and that his future was built, for better or worse, on the relic of his past as a publisher. So, it was not much of a future. The only books still being published were the ones produced by what once had been known as the European Union and was now the United States of Europe. All hail, blessed and mighty United States of Europe.
Just that morning an errand boy (a former architect whose practice had been put out of business by legislation endorsing a consortium of EUDCE funded Latvians as priority architects for the region) had delivered a hardback 400-page coffee-table book, printed on glossy paper. The book’s title was WRAP (the Waste and Resources Action Programme) and it explained how to avoid waste. It contained a list of 73 separate recycling depots where householders could obtain food stamp credits by delivering such assorted items as used yoghurt cartons, empty beer cans and belt buckles. People who knew and understood the rules, and were prepared to play by them, were rewarded with great riches. Those who didn’t know, didn’t understand or didn’t want to live by the rules were not.
The EUDCE bureaucrats, who had for years neither represented nor respected the people or their views but who had, like all good salesmen, manipulated their own promises to fit what they believed was expected, consistently created rules which harried and punished the hard working and the prudent and which favoured scroungers and thieves.
By the early part of the 21st century, burglars stood a better chance of getting away with their crimes than entrepreneurs had of succeeding with new businesses. (Officially, crime levels had been falling ever since EUDCE had been created and had been at historically low levels for 29 months in succession. Officially.) The man who worked hard to start a business, labouring long into the night and giving his health to create something lasting and worthwhile, was more likely to go bankrupt and end up in prison for debt than the burglar was to go to prison for stealing.
Wearied by a world that was changing in ways he didn’t much like, Tom believed that anyone still brave enough to be an optimist was simply someone who didn’t know enough.
Through the last quarter of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century politicians and bureaucrats became increasingly accustomed to making promises they never intended to keep and which, moreover, no one expected them to keep. Members of the electorate, the taxpayers, were regarded as of little or no real consequence, as long as their voting habits could be manipulated satisfactorily. The political class cynically exploited the trusting and the hopeful. Corruption became normal and was so widely accepted that those who were exposed often expressed outrage that they had been criticised for what they regarded as their rights. When politicians and policemen complained about bribery and corruption it was only to moan that they weren’t getting enough of it. Most areas of life, business, sport and entertainment, had been tainted by corruption, but politicians and bureaucrats had become consumed by it and none more consumed than those involved in the United States of Europe. Occasionally, there were outbursts of synthetic honesty. For a while, one or two people in public positions vowed to honour promises (unless or until it became necessary or even convenient to do otherwise) but soon even they fell by the wayside. EUDCE bureaucrats (like the politicians who had signed away England’s past, present and future, and who had ironically put themselves out of business, were uniformly ambitious, ruthless, utterly lacking in responsibility or any sense of respect or decency; they were driven by pure arrogance and self-regard.
In the early days of the organisation’s existence the EUDCE bureaucrats regarded loyalty, compliance, innocence, responsibility, obedience and a misplaced sense of respect as signs of stupidity and weakness. They encouraged a sense of trust and then took advantage of the trust they had helped create and nurture. And as the months and years passed by, in something of a blur it has to be said, it became harder and harder for those who wanted to protest to do so.
The majority, the electorate who had given away power in ignorance or misplaced allegiance, were weakened; oppressed by fear (deliberately exacerbated) and by endless, ever-changing, everthickening layers of bureaucracy; confused and frightened; strangled by red tape; always running and hiding from the unknown and from their own susceptibilities and inadequacies; always busy, too busy to speak out, too busy and afraid to put their heads above the parapet; too afraid to protest; sometimes, it seemed too busy to breathe. Official policy was, and had been for years, to scare people and to then solve their fears by offering to take responsibility. All the people had to do was to obey the rules they were given. EUDCE kept creating more enemies, more fear and more rules. It was as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the air in the same way that the goodness had been squeezed out of the food. The people were medicated, abused, poisoned, threatened, tortured and used. Always used. Always abused by cryptorchid lickspittles. In the end people just did their best to get by; to survive; and to forget.
Much of the time they did not understand what was happening to them. And much of the time, it seemed, they simply did not care as long as there was the Telescreen to provide pseudo-spiritual and quasi-intellectual balm.
Chapter 5
The credit crunch which started in 2007 as a result of a peculiarly potent mixture of greed, corruption, dishonesty and incompetence (spread widely and generously among politicians, bankers, economists and civil servants) was so badly managed that it led to the world’s first major financial crisis. What was at the time called the United Kingdom was at the epicentre. Thanks to the exaggerated nature of the greed and incompetence among British politicians and bankers the nation stumbled and then fell. Interest rates eventually hit 20%, paused for a while and then soared; inflation rose so high that the officials entrusted with the job of massaging the official figures gave up and stopped even trying to estimate the rate at which prices were rising; the pound sterling collapsed as rapidly as the German deutschmark and the Zimbabwean dollar had done before it. Politicians who had been in power during the early part of the 21st century fled abroad to escape the wrath of a furious electorate.
The UK’s energy shortage, a consequence of an absence of planning that would have mortified a half-competent housewife, was intensified by the collapse in the world’s supply of commodities. Richer countries took most of what there was. Not being one of the richer countries, very little oil or gas found its way to Britain. Food shorta
ges were so severe that starvation and malnutrition overtook cancer and heart disease as the commonest causes of death.
The EU’s policies had for years encouraged waste, pollution and almost irreparable environmental damage, with the result that domestic food production had fallen, fallen and fallen again. The lack of oil, and the consequent inability to import food supplies from other continents, meant dramatic and permanent food shortages. People had to queue for everything. Shopping for the ingredients for a simple meal would often take a morning. There were separate queues for individual vegetables so the shopper had to stand in line three times to buy potatoes, cabbages and beans. Then, there were queues to pay for the items and to collect a payment receipt. And, finally, more queuing to present the receipt and pick up the produce that had been paid for. It was, said one man, worse than buying a book at Foyles had been in the 1960s. A meal involving four ingredients meant standing in line twelve times.
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