Tom was lucky to have the work together with the pay packet, and the occasional handful of food that he could earn if he did small jobs for the allotment holders. There was no job security, of course and if he was too ill to attend he didn’t get paid. Only sprouts had job security, sick pay, pensions and employment rights.
He dreamt of producing a small newsletter, an independent source of news for suspects. But it was impossible to find a printing machine or a paper supply and so the dream remained a dream. But he kept it alive. ‘What is a man without his dreams?’ he asked himself whenever the dream began to fade.
Chapter 7
Having a sprout on the doorstep was a frightening enough thought. Having one actually in the house was close enough to alarming to have given Tom palpitations. Tom looked around upstairs, desperately trying to see his world through the eyes of a sprout. The first thing he noticed was a battered paperback copy of David Copperfield lying beside the bed. He grabbed it, and quickly skimmed it under the bed so that it was out of sight. Not even sprouts were allowed to read Dickens any more.
Dickens was an English author and, therefore, like Shakespeare and others of that nationality, officially proscribed. Conquering England, and turning it into nine regions, had been the most difficult task for the EUDCE bureaucrats. It was something of which they were particularly proud. They had for years run a clever propaganda war to outlaw Englishness. They’d fired up hatred of the English among the Scots and the Welsh by telling extraordinary lies about historical events. It had been very effective.
‘I’m a Senior Soft Artefacts Label Inspector,’ said the newcomer. He looked to be in his early 40s – young enough to be enthusiastic and not old enough to have lost his enthusiasm for his job or his belief in the organisation. He liked to sound polite and helpful when he first met suspects. He felt that politeness, unexpected and out of context, was always curiously menacing. Underneath the fake courtesy he had the same confidence enjoyed by all the sprouts. Like most petty officials his self-importance was derived from the knowledge that he, and not the suspect to whom he was talking, had access to really important people.
Boris Perovskite was short and clinically obese and a fully trained expert on Label Maintenance Legislation. No one had used his first name for at least a decade. He was Romanian and homosexual. Recruiters always gave priority to applicants who were born outside the country where they were working. And they were instructed to give preferential treatment to applicants who were not heterosexual. (Applicants of both sexes who had not undergone the quasicompulsory homosexual ‘experience’ at one of the Gay Awareness Camps, widely regarded as EUDCE’s version of National Service, were not entitled to be considered for any sort of official post.)
Perovskite had three interests: his moustache (which he trimmed each morning so that it looked as much like Adolf Hitler’s as possible), his collection of 1970’s Japanese music boxes and his work. He attended compulsory body-realignment tutorials three afternoons a week and counselling sessions two evenings a week. At the tutorials he was encouraged to discuss his interest in food with a trained nutritionist who believed that talking about food would eventually reduce Perovskite’s addiction to chips and burgers. At the counselling sessions Perovskite was encouraged to talk about his obsession with food to a trained and qualified counsellor who had an open mind on all issues and was concerned only with offering support. Because Perovskite insisted on the sessions being conducted in his native language, and because there was a shortage of Romanian nutritionists and counsellors, translators were hired to attend all these sessions. Since the course of tutorials and counselling sessions had begun Perovskite had gained just 17 kilograms in weight. Computer generated graphs showed that his weight was accumulating at a slower pace than before the sessions had started and so both the nutritionist and the counsellor had received substantial bonuses from EUDCE as a reward for this success.
Perovskite checked the soles of his shoes before entering Tom’s home. He checked not, as most people do, to make sure that his shoes were clean but to make sure that they were dirty. He always stepped in dog faeces before performing a domestic inspection. It gave him a buzz to walk around leaving a stinking trail on the carpets and his work always took him into every room in a house. No one ever complained. No one ever complained about sprouts. If suspects were young, male, attractive and alone he always insisted that they remove all their clothes, including approved undergarments, so that he could check that the labels had not been tinkered with. Being a Software Label Inspector was so much more fun than being a Hardware Label Inspector. Who wanted to look at the backs of fridges and Telescreen sets all day long?
‘Under EUDCE Directive 4879/28162 I have the authority to...’ Tom’s brain shut down temporarily. A Soft Artefacts Label Inspector was, he knew, authorised to enter any suspect’s home to check that EUDCE approval and rating labels had not been removed from furniture, duvets and other bed linen, carpets, soft toys and clothing. The law said that A&R labels, as they were known, had to be at least 4 cm by 4 cm in size. They were usually bigger. And somehow, they almost managed to look unsightly. On clothing, particularly underclothing, they were often placed in a position that seemed designed to cause maximum discomfort. The penalty for removing a EUDCE approved rating label was severe.
‘Do you understand?’ demanded the second inspector, as though speaking to a slightly backward child.
Pierogi Tchotchke was sweating and had clearly been doing so for some time for he smelt of stale sweat. He was shaped like a pear and had a long, thinnish face that made him look a little like a badger, though he did not look as sensitive, as friendly or as intelligent as a badger. He was 22-years-old and reputed to be the youngest Soft Artefacts Labels Inspector in the region. He did not consider himself to be a dull, one-track person like many of his colleagues. (He regarded Perovskite as dull and superficial and it irked him that Perovskite was the senior Inspector and would occasionally make this clear to the suspects whose artefacts they were inspecting.) Tschotchke boasted of having a number of interests outside his work. He collected pocket calculators and had over a hundred of them. He was also contemplating starting a collection of commercial adding machines. When required to give a preference (on forms and when making purchases in the sprout stores) he always stated that he was heterosexual, though he had not, as yet, acquired any experience in this area.
The thick, dark blue suits they both wore had been designed to be hard wearing and warm in winter. Female sprouts wore the same sort of suits. As he looked at the two sprouts in their ghastly suits Tom couldn’t help thinking of Thoreau’s advice that we distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. How Thoreau would have distrusted the European Superstate. The material of which the suits were made was said to be waterproof and quite possibly was. But it wasn’t the right sort of thing to be wearing in midsummer. The suits were both worn and shiny. Numerous snags and darns showed that the stuff of which the suits were made wasn’t as hard-wearing as the manufacturers claimed. Lower grade sprouts received one new suit a year and so they had to wear the same suit every day. Since the only dry cleaning shops dealt exclusively with the clothes of high level sprouts, and since the material took a day or more to dry out if washed, the sprouts rarely, if ever, washed their suits. They weren’t paid well enough to buy other clothes so they wore their official-issue suits every day, whether they were working or not. It was hardly surprising that they all stank.
Tom nodded.
‘Sign here.’ Aggressively, quite rudely, Tchotchke thrust a paper pad towards Tom who took it, read it, scribbled his signature on it and handed it back.
The inspectors had once used electronic signature pads. They’d gone back to paper records for two reasons. Repeated and unexpected outages in wireless communication systems had resulted in the loss of masses of collected data. And restrictions in supplies of raw materials meant that replacing the portable electronic devices had proved impossible, even for EUDCE. Not even EUDCE could g
et hold of portable computers. The oil shortage meant that there were no longer any factories capable of making them. And even if there had been there wouldn’t have been any batteries for them. The authorities still kept computerised web-based records but only on network linked desk-top hardware. Unlike everyone else EUDCE did still have an almost reliable electricity supply.
‘How many people are there sharing this accommodation?’ demanded Perovskite. In the old days the sprouts always knew the answers before they asked the questions. Since they’d had to revert to carrying paper forms they’d lost their edge. These days they only knew if someone had lied when they got back to their headquarters and keyed in the information they’d been given. But all sprouts who met with suspects as part of their daily routine had extensive training in how to dominate conversations with posture and tone of voice. They were like policemen, army officers and headmasters in that they knew how to demand attention and respect. It had been decided by EUDCE’s Citizen Manipulation Advisors (of whom there were many) that calling EUDCE employees ‘officiers’, and everyone else suspects was an easy way to establish an automatic pecking order; to give EUDCE employees status and to make everyone else feel suspicious, vulnerable and, most important of all, defensive.
‘Three,’ replied Tom, who found himself feeling curiously apologetic; as though he had been caught doing something wrong before the interrogation had even started. ‘Myself, my wife and my aunt.’
‘Still living with auntie, eh?’ sneered the inspector, writing down this information on the pad. He wrote slowly, deliberately, with the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth. Tom noticed that he used the stub of a green colouring pencil. This wasn’t for any particular reason. There was a worldwide shortage of pens and EUDCE had commandeered every writing implement they could find. Some sprouts were filling in forms with charcoal sticks, others were using children’s crayons. Filling in the small spaces on the forms with thick crayons was notoriously difficult.
‘She’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,’ explained Tom. ‘We took her in. She is too old and too ill for institutional care. And she’s a suspect, of course.’
The inspector looked at Tom. ‘You think the policy of protecting the State’s facilities for essential employees is a bad one?’ Even in speech he somehow managed to give the word ‘State’ the dignity of an initial capital letter.
‘No, no, not at all,’ lied Tom quickly. Lying came easy to everyone when talking to sprouts. Tom consoled himself with the thought that the truth is often a complicated confection of contradictions. Nothing is ever as simple or as straightforward as we would like it to be. The one relevant certainty was that criticising EUDCE policy was illegal and was an offence which was taken very seriously. It was for this reason that no one in Government or the media had ever been able to blame EUDCE for the closure of post offices, the chronic and accelerating shortage of GPs, the deterioration in schools, the abandoning of weekly rubbish collections (and, subsequently, the abandonment of fortnightly collections and, eventually, the complete abandonment of rubbish collections), the disappearance of long-established army regiments, the disappearance of policemen from the streets and so on and so on.
The result was that the EUDCE laws were adhered to strictly, regardless of whether or not they made any sort of sense. And laws were the one thing that wasn’t in short supply. Each EUDCE Commissioner thought he was the only one making rules (and creating chaos). But there were 100 commissioners – all making rules and causing chaos. The rules just kept coming; fluttering into people’s lives like snowflakes. Endless nonsense which seemed designed to destroy every sensible aspect of human endeavour. Much of the red tape was conflicting. So, for example, there was a law which said that bicycles should all be equipped with two bells (one to use and one as a spare in case the other one didn’t work) and another that said that ringing a bicycle bell was unacceptable noise pollution. The result was that bicycles were all fitted with two bells but no one ever rang any of them (except by accident). Applicants taking the examination for their bicycle riding licence (just about every human activity, including sex, required a licence and, inevitably, a test fee and an annual maintenance fee) were expected to display their ability to use their bells without actually ringing them.
There was a law (introduced by the Muslim Affairs Commissioner) which said that women should cover their heads whenever they went out in public. And there was another law (introduced by a lobbyist representing a group of Jews) which stated firmly that it was illegal for women to cover their heads.
Whatever you did could get you arrested and deported. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter would have all felt at home in the United States of Europe.
‘You have permission for her to be living here?’
Tom nodded. ‘We were granted permission.’
‘And you pay the fee for a Residential Aunt Licence?’
Tom nodded.
The inspector painstakingly wrote all this down on his form. The sprouts always worked slowly. There were too many of them and they tried to spread out their work so that it didn’t quite fit the time available. It was, they knew, the best way to ensure they weren’t made redundant. Very few sprouts were ever made redundant but it was the one thing that terrified them. Falling from sprout to suspect meant losing everything: dignity, status, income, pension rights, shopping privileges, health care rights and transport access. (It had been said, by a former Bishop, now lost somewhere in Africa, that suspects were treated worse than black folk had been treated in America’s deep south. ‘To be a suspect in 21st century Europe is to be a nigger,’ he had announced in his last sermon, noting that suspects were not allowed to use any form of public transport designated for use by sprouts.)
Very occasionally the authorities would make an example of someone ‘pour encourager les autres’. The dismissed sprouts were always lowly functionaries, of course. Higher-ranking employees had guaranteed jobs, pensions and perks for life.
The sprout looked around, taking in the threadbare carpet, the lumpiness of the two easy chairs and the sofa and the shabbiness of the other furniture. The magazines neatly lined up on the coffee table were well-read. The date on the magazine on the top of the pile showed that it was 14-years-old. There was a small bookcase against one wall. ‘You’ve a lot of rubbish in here, haven’t you?’ He walked over to the bookcase, turned his head to one side and read the titles to check that they were all on the approved list.
***
Tom wasn’t worried. He knew that the books on display were all licensed. Most of them were EUDCE publications glorifying the European State’s magnificent history, and the many ways in which it had enriched the lives of the European people. Despite having published a number of books of its own EUDCE didn’t really approve of books and had slapped a huge tax on anything published by outsiders, in order to discourage reading. The American CIA had once produced a report showing that books encourage people to think and thereby encourage more revolutionary activity than newspapers, radio and television put together. EUDCE agreed with this. They had issued a statement announcing that all revolutions and ‘bad thoughts’ were started by books and that in future adults should derive most of their entertainment and education from officially blessed (and licensed) programmes broadcast on the Telescreen by the BBC.
In the last days of schools, just before cereal manufactures were licensed to give away free diplomas, primary school children who attended at least once a week were automatically given a degree in anything they could spell. Tom knew children aged 12 who had so many degrees that it took them ten minutes to write them all down. Children under six years of age went not to infant school but to pre-university college. Talk that EUDCE had lowered standards was dismissed as nonsense. A bureaucrat who had just awarded a fistful of degrees to a four-year-old Latvian, said that the evidence proved conclusively that standards had been raised. But there had been an outcry when an eighteen-month-old Israeli had been shown on the T
elescreen receiving his 100th degree (during the ceremony the recipient stuck it into his mouth and ate a good part of it).
Now children no longer went to school (‘What is the point of wasting public money on building schools when every child already has its own personal tutor?’ demanded a leading sprout, a licensed educationalist, explaining why children should obtain all their education from the Internet. ‘We should not waste money on such fripperies as schools.’)
When schools had closed, the Telescreen had been the only source of educational material. Lessons were available on the BBC and examinations were also taken and marked on the Telescreen. A survey Tom had seen on the BBC had reported that 98% of children under 10 had chosen to specialise in studying celebrity gossip and advanced celebrity gossip. Just over 96% of older students were taking degrees in similar subjects.
(‘My 14-year-old has just completed a PhD on political gossip from the early 21st century,’ a friend of Tom’s had told him. ‘She can tell you endless stuff about all sorts of people I’ve never heard of. She knows more than is decent to know about some woman called Jordan who was apparently a Regional Health Minister for a while, a transsexual called Simone Cowell who was a Regional Foreign Secretary for a year and two broadcasters called Ross and Brand. The Jordan woman was apparently appointed Regional Health Minister because of her experience of cosmetic surgery. Sadly, it all ended tragically. She apparently suffered a melt-down during a particularly hot summer. Ross and Brand were apparently well-known in their day, though I haven’t the foggiest what they did. They apparently both ended up presenting home decorating programmes on a Do It Yourself channel that ran for a while a few years ago. Back in the days when there were lots of channels. And, if you’re really interested, my 14-year-old has a friend who can tell you the bowel habits of at least sixty reality television stars.’ Tom had gratefully declined the offer.) The enthusiasm for webucation programmes (as they were called) had been severely damaged by the introduction of supermarket degrees. Sprouts and suspects alike could obtain educational qualifications merely by joining the approved ‘Free Degrees Programme’ on the Telescreen and collecting coupons issued by the googletesco, EUDCE’s official online store.
Revolt Page 4