Revolt

by Vernon Coleman

  ‘Can’t you get someone else to give you a quote? Some other firm?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘There’s only one firm of Home Safety Advisory Consultants licensed in this region,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t seem right,’ said Dalby. ‘There’s no competition for anything these days.’

  ‘EUDCE sells exclusive licences,’ said Tom. ‘They can charge more for exclusive licences. Officially, there’s only one firm of plumbers in this region.’

  EUDCE sold licences to everyone, and for everything imaginable. People who had for years done their jobs, practised their professions, effectively, efficiently, responsibly and fairly, suddenly found that they were ordered to take new tests, pass new examinations and (this the key) obtain new licences for which they had to pay hefty, annual fees. The money was paid to a bunch of EUDCE authorised eurocratic regulators so that they could set more tests, introduce more licences and collect more fees. EUDCE had become a self perpetuating, self-funding leech, sucking the life-blood both from the hard-working professionals and from the citizens who relied upon the services they provided.

  To pay for their licences the regulated workers had to increase their fees and in order to find the time to speak to the regulators, and to take the examinations required of them, they had to reduce the quality of the service they provided. Everything sank to the lowest common denominator. Fees went up, service went down. Every professional, every tradesman in every business and every trade, had to be regulated and had to pay for the privilege of being licensed.

  ‘We know a plumber who does work privately,’ whispered Dorothy. ‘If you ever need to get in touch with him, let us know. He’s brilliant with dripping taps, blocked drains – that sort of thing.’

  ‘We’re terrified that we’ll have a Residential Placement Officer come round,’ said Dalby. ‘Several of the people in our building have been forced to take in people. An old lady who lives on the floor below us now has five Turks living with her. I met her on the landing the other day. She looked terrible. They ate her cat the first night they were there. Just killed it, cooked it and ate it. She has no more rooms than we have. Just one living room and one bedroom. A tiny kitchenette and a tiny bathroom.’

  There was a housing shortage. This was partly a result of the very active pro-immigration policy introduced by EUDCE, and partly a result of the fact that houses built in the .latter part of the 20th century had been shoddily made and were falling down at a calamitous rate. There were no materials for building new houses or for repairing old ones. The result was that householders were forced to share their accommodation.

  ‘She can’t complain, of course,’ said Gladwys. ‘They’d charge her with aggravated racism and send her to an Involuntary Euthanasia Clinic.’ Suspects over the age of 60 who were arrested weren’t exported. They were considered likely to be too unfit to work in the fields and were, therefore, sent to one of EUDCE’s Involuntary Euthanasia Clinics.

  ‘I thought the immigrants were all leaving, all going back home,’ said Dorothy. ‘But for every one who leaves another dozen now seem to arrive.’

  ‘It’s the EUDCE Racial Amalgamation Policy,’ explained Tom. ‘The aim is to homogenise the European population.’

  ‘But why do these people still come here?’ demanded Dalby.

  ‘There’s no work, little food, overcrowded housing and a completely broken-down infrastructure. The trains run when there’s enough diesel or coal to move them. The hospitals are more or less closed to anyone who isn’t a sprout.’

  ‘EUDCE gives low-grade trusty jobs to Turks, Romanians, Latvians, Croatians, Estonians, Poles and so on,’ explained Tom.

  ‘And the Maltese too.’ He hesitated. ‘What the hell do you call people from Malta?’

  ‘Maltesers I suppose,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ replied Tom. ‘And they give resettlement grants to thousands more. They have huge recruiting campaigns. A Pole I know told me he got a grant of 5,000 euros to come here. If he goes back within 12 months he has to give back the grant. The sprouts hope that a few of them will find girls of English origin, stay here, have children, and settle down. It’s part of their Social Integration Policy.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Dalby. ‘I don’t suppose we can get grants to go somewhere else?’

  ‘Sadly no,’ said Tom. ‘Those of English origin aren’t allowed to apply for grants.’

  They all sat glumly in silence for a while.

  ‘I could come round and pretend to be living in your flat,’ said Tom. ‘They might not report you for undercrowding if you have another adult living with you.’

  ‘That wouldn’t work,’ said Dorothy. ‘They’d want to see your papers – something to prove that you’re registered as living there.’

  ‘I could get some false papers,’ said Tom. ‘I know a guy who makes quite good ones. He used to work for the Government, when we last had one.’

  ‘You couldn’t get them by tomorrow,’ Dorothy pointed out.

  ‘No,’ admitted Tom sadly.

  The four of them sat in silence.

  ‘Have you noticed that most of the sprouts come from Romania, Turkey and Israel these days,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘I never understood how Israel came to be a member of EUDCE,’ said Gladwys.

  ‘They were in the Eurovision Song Contest and so they had fast-tracked membership to EUDCE,’ said Dorothy.

  Israel hadn’t been the only surprise. After eight African nations were officially accepted as fully integrated regions of the United States of Europe it was widely agreed that EUDCE had become China’s main competitor for world dominance – the USA having been relegated to the status of also-ran.

  ‘I heard EUDCE is planning to appoint a lot of new low-level sprouts from Latvia,’ said Gladwys. ‘More homogenisation, I suppose.’

  ‘Did you hear that they’re phasing out English?’ said Tom.

  Dalby and Gladwys looked at him.

  ‘A friend of mine who used to work as a cleaner at the BBC told me that the commissioners have decided that EUDCE’s two official languages are to be Turkish and French. We’re all going to be given two years to learn one or the other. After that all other languages will be illegal.’

  This was clearly a shock to both Dalby and Gladwys.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It was discussed at a BBC Allegiance Meeting.’

  The BBC was, as it had been even before the British Broadcasting Corporation became the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation (a change that involved a change of notepaper rather than any change in underlying policy matters), the unofficial propaganda machine for EUDCE. Every morning BBC staff at all its studios were expected to attend morning Allegiance Meetings where, in a daily ceremony known to outsiders as ‘morning prayers’, they would swear loyalty to the European project and the United States of Europe.

  ‘They’ve been planning it for ages,’ said Tom.

  ‘When are they bringing that in?’ asked Dalby.

  Tom shrugged. ‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘My friend reached her 60th birthday so they fired her. No pension, no watch, no party, no thanks. Just ‘Don’t bother corning in on Monday.’ She’s opening up a herbal clinic in her living room. But it means we don’t have access to their waste paper basket any more.’

  ‘I could just do with a nice cup of tea!’

  Everyone turned. Tom’s aunt was standing in the doorway. ‘I had a nap,’ she said. She was wearing a long, baggy, grey cardigan over an ankle length pale pink nightdress and holding Tabatha in her arms. She stifled a yawn. ‘I take lots of naps. I think I may be addicted to them. This nightie used to be cream but I washed it with a pair of Dorothy’s red knickers and now it’s pink.’

  ‘You know my aunt, don’t you?’ said Tom to Dalby and Gladwys.

  They said they did. ‘Auntie, this is Dalby and Gladwys.’

  ‘Hello. Everyone thinks I’m potty,’ said Tom’s aunt, waving to Dalby and Gladwys. ‘But I’m as sane as a
ferret. Ask me the name of the last Prime Minister. That’s what the man at the hospital kept asking me.’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Go on, ask me,’ insisted Tom’s aunt.

  ‘What’s the name of the Prime Minister?’ asked Dalby.

  Tom’s aunt stared at him and then grinned broadly. ‘Don’t have the foggiest,’ she said. ‘And I don’t give a fig. There hasn’t been a decent one since Winston Churchill. Most of them have been traitors.’

  Tom looked at his aunt. He sometimes wondered whether she had Alzheimer’s disease at all, or whether she used the label as a convenient screen behind which she could hide when she didn’t want to be bothered by the world around her. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Aunt,’ he said. His aunt didn’t like coffee.

  ‘Make sure it’s a nice one,’ she told him. ‘Do you know the funny thing is that although my nightie is now pink Dorothy’s knickers are still as red as they ever were.’

  ‘I suppose we’d better be going,’ said Dalby, standing up. Gladwys stood up too.

  ‘Don’t go just because of me,’ said Tom’s aunt. ‘I don’t have fits or do anything antisocial.’ She smiled at them. When she smiled it was almost impossible to dislike her or to be cross with her. ‘I won’t mention knickers again.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Dalby, embarrassed. ‘It’s not because of you. We were just going anyway. We have to get up early in the morning.’

  ‘Are you going somewhere nice or do you have the sprouts coming round?’ asked Tom’s aunt.

  ‘The sprouts are coming,’ replied Gladwys.

  ‘Don’t be frightened of them,’ insisted Tom’s aunt. ‘Politeness is all very well but it doesn’t put butter on parsnips. We had the sprouts here.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Gladwys. She turned to Dorothy. ‘You didn’t say.’

  ‘They were probably too shy to mention it,’ said Tom’s aunt. ‘We had two. They came to look at the labels.’

  ‘Strewth,’ said Dalby. ‘I hate the label inspectors. They always manage to find something. Last time they visited, one found an old pair of sunglasses that didn’t have a label on them. We got an official warning.’

  ‘And they took the sunglasses away with them,’ added Gladwys.

  ‘They always take something with them,’ said Tom.

  ‘We killed ours,’ said Tom’s aunt. No one spoke.

  No one breathed.

  No one moved.

  Chapter 19

  There are, Tom realised, different types of silence. This was the deepest, quietest silence he had ever heard. Some silences aren’t really silences at all. People stop talking but they do other things that make other noises. They clink teacups, they rustle pieces of paper, they blow their noses, they clear their throats, they scratch their heads, they recross their legs.

  This was a true silence. A time without sound. The room was so silent that Tom could hear an alarm clock ticking in the house next door. He could hear four people breathing. He could feel his heart beating so fast he felt sure that it would explode. He laughed nervously and waved a hand, as though to suggest that this was just his aunt’s craziness talking.

  ‘Both of them,’ said Tom’s aunt, who seemed unaware that her words had had such an effect. She lowered her voice, as though about to share a secret. ‘It’s very easy,’ she added, confidentially. ‘You just hit them with a frying pan.’

  Everyone in the room looked at her. Two of the people in the room didn’t really believe what they’d heard. The other two didn’t want to believe that they’d heard it.

  ‘You hit them with a frying pan,’ she repeated. She made a hitting movement with her right hand; her fingers formed into a fist as though holding the handle of a frying pan. She looked around at the open mouths and bewildered, slightly frightened faces. ‘One just fell down the stairs so we didn’t really kill that one. But we finished him off. And we killed the other one with the frying pan,’ she said. She turned to Tom. ‘We should put two notches in the frying pan handle,’ she said.

  Dalby looked at Tom and then at Dorothy. He sat down again. Gladwys sat down too.

  ‘She’s not joking is she?’ said Dalby. He looked first at Tom and then at Dorothy.

  ‘No,’ said Tom very softly. This was, he felt, the moment of truth. They were about to find out just how much they could trust their visitors. He took a deep breath. ‘No, she’s not joking.’

  ‘What did you do with the bodies?’ asked Gladwys.

  ‘We took them to the hospital,’ said Dorothy. ‘We put them on gurneys, those flat half-stretcher half-trolley things they have in hospitals, and left both of them in a corridor.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last Thursday.’

  ‘Five days ago?’ Tom nodded.

  ‘And nothing has happened?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The police haven’t been round?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think you got away with it?’

  ‘Hope so,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Why haven’t we heard anything about it?’ asked Gladwys. ‘Has it been on the Telescreen?’

  ‘Maybe the police are stupid,’ said Dalby.

  ‘Maybe they are,’ said Tom firmly. ‘They rely on sneaks and computers to do everything for them. Most of them never leave their offices. But unless computers are programmed they don’t think round corners. No sprout has been murdered for years and so my guess is that they wouldn’t consider it as a possibility.’ He hesitated. ‘The only other explanation I can think of is that they know but aren’t doing anything about it because they’re too nervous to admit that two sprouts got killed. Sprouts go into people’s homes all day long. They’re armed only with their arrogance and the knowledge that we’re terrified of them. The commissioners wouldn’t want suspects to know that sprouts were vulnerable. And they certainly wouldn’t want the sprouts to know.’

  ‘And we helped confuse the issue by putting identification tags on the two bodies we left in the hospital,’ Dorothy reminded Tom. ‘It made it all look like an official cock-up.’

  ‘That was a brilliant touch,’ agreed Tom. He explained how Dorothy had done this.

  Tom’s aunt, who was bored by all this talk, leapt up and went to the cupboard under the sink. She pulled out the frying pan. ‘We hit them with this!’ she told the two visitors, waving the frying pan in the air around their heads. ‘This is what we used.’ She brandished the frying pan as she had done when hitting the sprout. ‘Whoosh!’ she said.

  ‘Was it easy?’ asked Gladwys.

  ‘Getting rid of the bodies?’

  ‘No. Killing them?’

  ‘That was surprisingly easy,’ said Tom. ‘One of the sprouts fell down the stairs. That was an accident. We were standing on the landing. He was poking me in the chest with his finger, you know the way sprouts do, really hard, and it was hurting me so I stepped aside. The next time he prodded I wasn’t there and he went down the stairs. He didn’t die straight away but it was pretty clear he was pretty badly hurt. The other one threatened to have the three of us deported. He wouldn’t listen to reason. He knew it wasn’t my fault but he wouldn’t listen to me. He said I’d pushed the other sprout.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I didn’t have any choice,’ he said, almost whispering.

  For a while no one spoke.

  ‘I’d do it again,’ said Tom. ‘It was the right thing to do. The killing was easy. It was getting rid of the bodies that was tricky.’

  Once again, no one spoke.

  ‘Are you terribly shocked?’ Dorothy asked Gladwys.

  Gladwys looked at Dalby. They both looked towards Dorothy. ‘No,’ said Gladwys. ‘Not shocked.’ She thought again. ‘Not shocked at all,’ she said very quietly.

  ‘I would describe myself as sympathetic and interested,’ said Dalby, quietly. ‘Very interested. Very sympathetic.’

  ‘Did you have to hit the one you killed very much?’ asked Gladwys.

  ‘A few times,’ nodded Tom. ‘Quite hard. Yes
, quite hard.’

  ‘Boof!’ said his aunt. She raised the frying pan, which she was still holding, and then brought it down fast. She smiled at them.

  ‘Did your aunt...?’ asked Dalby.

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Tom. He half smiled. ‘She turned out to be surprisingly good at it.’ He swallowed. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think what I did was wrong.’ He rubbed a hand through what was left of his hair. ‘EUDCE has taken over our country, our culture, our past, our present, our future, our democracy and our freedom. They haven’t left us anything. The people who represent the new State, the sprouts, may not have been responsible for creating the EUDCE concept but they’re responsible for what is happening to us. We can’t beat a system because it doesn’t really exist; it’s a plan, a notion, a badness. All we can do is chop off the arms and legs; the beasts who do the State’s bidding. We can’t reach the commissioners because they’ve all locked themselves away in Brussels.’

  ‘But the sprouts are here with us every day,’ said Dalby.

  ‘If you got away with it...,’ began Gladwys.

  ‘Maybe others could too...,’ Dalby continued the thought.

  ‘I’ve got a bottle of potato wine,’ said Tom, suddenly. He stood up. ‘I was keeping it for Christmas but I have a feeling this is a special occasion too.’

  ‘I’ll get some glasses,’ said Dorothy.

  When Tom had opened the potato wine and filled all the glasses the questions came thick and fast. Where exactly did you put the bodies? How did you get them there? Do you really think you’ll get away with it? Do you think we could get rid of the Telescreen license guy? The planning man? The idiot from the valuation office who comes round to photograph everything inside the house? The income tax inspector?’

  And then, finally.

  ‘Can you help us get rid of the sprouts who are coming to see us tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll pass the test with flying colours,’ said Tom. He tried to sound more reassuring than he felt.

  ‘It isn’t the test that really worries us,’ said Gladwys. ‘We’re doing what we can to help ourselves so it isn’t entirely out of our hands. What really worries us is the fear that they’re going to make us take lodgers.’