Although EUDCE had done its best to rid England of most of its history, and had done so with remarkable, custom-crushing efficiency, it had embraced one glorious part of Olde England: the traditional honours system.
The honours systems in much of Europe had been dismantled generations earlier, but the bureaucratic aristocrats who now ran EUDCE rather enjoyed the idea of decorating themselves, and adding the extra dignity to which they felt they were entitled, by making themselves Sirs, Dames, Ladies and Lords. And so, since there was nothing and no one to stop them, that’s exactly what they did.
***
Dame Phyllis was moaning because one of her Deputy Chief Assistant Commissioners, Israeli-born Sir Czardas Tsastske, had just confessed that neither he nor anyone else working in the Regional Offices could tell her how many suspects were now living in the Region.
Sir Czardas had been born Percival Liebermann but had changed his name to something which he thought would offer him a better chance of rising high within the EUDCE hierarchy. Many of EUDCE’s high-ranking security officers had been born in Israel, the last nation to join the European Union before it morphed painlessly into EUDCE, but most of them had adopted names which might have once been more widely found in the telephone directories of the countries formerly known as belonging to Eastern Europe.
Sir Czardas had made a personal fortune selling confiscated penknives in the first decade of the 21st century. (‘Well, what did you think we were going to do with them?’ he demanded of an indignant purchaser who had bought back his own multi-bladed Swiss Army penknife; a snip at two thirds of the original cost.)
‘It’s so much more difficult to keep track of people when they’re not employed by us,’ explained Sir Czardas Tsastske. He was considerably shorter than he would have liked to have been and plumper than was good for him but he had long ago decided that since he could do nothing about the former he would do nothing about the latter. He enjoyed food and had managed to convince himself that longevity (and its antithesis) are consequences of inheritance rather than appetite. His parents had died in a car crash and he had convinced himself that without that intervention they would have lived into their 90’s, if not beyond.
He had very little hair and that which he had, and which was visible to the casual observer, was largely situated in and around his ears. He dressed formally, in three piece pin-striped suits which he had made by a Chinese tailor in Savile Row, but allowed his flamboyant nature to express itself with the aid of flashy silk ties and handkerchiefs which he purchased in bulk from a small haberdashery store in the Burlington Arcade. Both the tailor and the haberdasher had originally catered for the old English aristocracy. These days they catered for the new European aristocracy. No one other than EUDCE employees could afford their prices, which were at the obscene end of absurd.
‘When they’re properly employed they’re frightened of losing their jobs. They’re so much easier to control. As things are now it’s becoming easier to control the sprouts than the damned moutons.’ (Like many senior sprouts he invariably referred to suspects as ‘moutons’.)
He glanced at the huge Telescreen, always switched on, which was fixed to the wall directly above the Chief Commissioner’s head. A matching Telescreen dominated the wall behind him. The screens were positioned so that both the Chief Commissioner and her visitor could keep up with everything that was going on. Every EUDCE employee, even those with senior positions, were terrified of missing something, anything, that they might be expected to have seen.
On the screen a tall woman with a tattooed scalp, who had failed at several careers and had consequently become a highly successful fashion model, news reader and Telescreen personality, was interviewing two raggedy young beggars standing outside a railway station in Bucharest.
The woman beggar, dressed in a micro skirt and a very skimpy top, carried a baby in her arms. The man, dressed inexplicably in a top hat and tails, had a dog curled up at his feet. The beggars, both English, were explaining that they’d travelled to Romania because a careers advisor had assured them that there were more opportunities for beggars there.
‘For a while we sold copies of a magazine called La Grande Question,’ explained the woman. ‘But then we attended a begging school run by two experienced Romanians and they told us we could make more money without it.’
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ asked the interviewer, smiling at the baby and making goo goo noises.
‘I dunno,’ said the girl. ‘It’s not ours.’
‘Not yours? Are you looking after it for someone?’
‘We rent it,’ said the girl. ‘Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.’
The interviewer seemed surprised.
‘We’d like to have it Saturdays,’ said the girl. ‘But there’s a waiting list for Saturdays. And by the time we get to the top of the waiting list the baby will be too old. So we’re trying to get on another waiting list.’
‘We have a little handwritten note in eight languages,’ said her boyfriend, a lanky Scottish youth. He showed a scruffy piece of paper to the interviewer.
‘What does it say?’
‘It says we’re poor and starving and the baby is sick and needs antibiotics,’ said the boy.
‘Is that true?’
The boy looked at her, as though trying to decide whether she was naive or stupid or both, and frowned.
‘Is the dog yours or is that rented?’ asked the interviewer.
‘Why would we rent a dog?’ asked the boy, as though only a stupid person would ask such a question. ‘Renting dogs doesn’t make commercial sense. You can pick ‘em up in the street for nothing.’
The Chief Commissioner, who had watched this exchange without emotion, turned away from the Telescreen. ‘I hear another twenty two sprouts have disappeared.’ She paused and looked over the top of a pair of imaginary spectacles at Sir Czardas. She believed this gave her a rather academic air. ‘How can sprouts just disappear?’ she demanded. ‘Where do they go to? Have they absconded? Been kidnapped?’ She picked up a diecast model of a 1931 Alfa Romeo which she kept on her desk. It was too pristine to have ever been played with by a careless child.
Sir Czardas looked uncomfortable. ‘I think these are just rumours,’ he said.
‘So what do you think is going on?’ demanded the Chief Commissioner. ‘I really need to get my ducks in a row on this one.’
‘Maybe people are trying to claim pensions for sprouts who didn’t exist?’ suggested Sir Czardas.
‘Would anyone do that?’ asked the Chief Commissioner frowning. ‘Isn’t that cheating?’
‘I’m afraid it is and they might,’ said Sir Czardas.
‘It comes to a fine thing when the people start cheating the system,’ said the Chief Commissioner who firmly believed that in a decent world things should happen the other way round. She sighed, genuinely disappointed. ‘I sometimes think we may be losing touch with our subjects,’ she said. ‘Wrongsiding the demographic.’ She paused and thought. ‘We need to do something to make the people feel proud,’ she said, as pleased with this thought as a mathematician might have been if he’d just found a flaw in something Einstein had written. ‘Something grand. Sprinkle a little magic.’
Sir Czardas had noticed the use of the word ‘subjects’. But he said nothing. He was by no means the first person to realise that you don’t get to be a senior regulator within the EUDCE hierarchy by noticing things that you weren’t intended to notice.
The Chief Commissioner watched with mild dismay as two bare knuckled fighters circled each other on the Telescreen. It was the weekly Fight to the Death. The winner received a small pension and a book of food stamps. The loser didn’t get anything but since it was a fight to the death he wouldn’t need anything. It had long ago occurred to her that the people who appeared on these programmes would do almost anything to appear on the Telescreen. She wondered, indeed, if there was a limit. Was there anything any of them wouldn’t do? She remembered reading that towards the end
of the 20th century a majority of Olympic athletes had agreed that they would take drugs that improved their performance, and increased their chances of winning a medal, even if doing so meant that they would die within a few years because of the side effects. And then she remembered another piece of research which had shown that, when invited to choose between ‘the Telescreen’ and ‘daddy’, a majority of small children had chosen the Telescreen. She didn’t quite know what any of this proved and, indeed, couldn’t be bothered to work out if it meant anything. But she thought it probably all meant something and helped explain what was happening.
On the Telescreen one of the men was gouging at the other’s eyes with his fingers. She turned her head and her gaze was attracted to a print of a painting of EUDCE’s Brussels headquarters. It was a standard print, issued to all senior sprouts throughout the EUDCE region. She loathed the picture and looked away quickly. It was a hideous building and a hideous painting. The Chief Commissioner collected art and had grown to believe that she had quite an eye. She was in the fortunate position that no one was likely to disagree with this belief. Her office contained two beautiful Abbotsford chairs (‘for looking at not sitting on’ she once told a visitor who had made the mistake of dropping her ample bottom onto the delicate seat), an early Georgian bookcase (which contained the Chief Commissioner’s collection of model soldiers) an early Regency chest of drawers and a Carolean day bed which had once graced the hallway in one of England’s stately homes. She had been enormously flattered when a former Professor of Art History, who had specialised in English furniture and who had been employed as a chauffeur at the Regional Parliament, had swallowed his pride and described her collection as ‘eclectic’. She had promoted the former academic and put him in charge of the mailroom. It was an undemanding job since the takeover of the postal services of Europe by EUDCE meant that correspondence that didn’t travel by fax, e-mail or courier usually didn’t travel very far at all. Having him in the building meant that if she ever wanted to ask his advice she could do so without delay. She had not yet asked his advice, though she had on numerous occasions invited his approval. He had learned to keep his opinions to himself but to offer enthusiastic approbation without hesitation.
Her favourite piece in the room was the sculpture she’d bought some years earlier and which now stood on a windowsill. It was a bust of a woman who had shoulder length hair a high, proud forehead and a perfect, aquiline nose. The sculptor had completed the bust by capturing the beginnings of an impressive embonpoint.
The Chief Commissioner was not a woman who allowed her emotions to affect her life in any serious way (‘emotions are for books’ was her favourite saying, though she herself never read anything that didn’t have an index and a long list of references at the back) but she had fallen in love with the bust, which she thought was very fine art.
‘Have they mended my Bentley?’ she asked suddenly. Apart from her art collection, the Chief Commissioner’s main interest was her extensive collection of motor cars. She had twelve, including a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce, two BMWs and a 1955 Bentley S1. Unfortunately, the Chief Commissioner, who enjoyed driving, always expected other motorists to get out of her way (she flew a small flag on whichever car she was using to make it clear who was inside) and she sometimes overestimated the ability of other drivers to do this expeditiously. The Bentley, painted black and with blacked out windows, had been damaged in a collision with a small delivery vehicle.
Sir Czardas coughed nervously. ‘I understand there’s some problem with finding a replacement headlamp glass,’ he said. He wiped sweat off his forehead and upper lip. Generally speaking it was not, he knew, a good idea to disappoint the Chief Commissioner. The Chief Commissioner grunted to show her dissatisfaction. ‘I need it mended quickly,’ she said. She always used the word ‘need’ in preference to ‘want’. ‘It’s a family heirloom.’ The Bentley hadn’t belonged to her family, her family hadn’t owned anything grander than a bucket, but it had been someone else’s family heirloom and that, she thought, entitled her to describe it as a family heirloom. She looked again at the bust on the windowsill. Looking at it always soothed her. She found it quietly inspirational. ‘What we need is something to lift the people.’ She thought of all the people (sprouts and suspects) as ‘her people’. Her subjects.
‘What a marvellous idea,’ said Sir Czardas, nodding like one of those dogs motorists used to put on the back shelf in their cars. ‘Brilliant!’
On the Telescreen a new programme had started. Programmes on the Telescreen were as short as attention spans. A tall, weedy, dark-skinned youth in a powder blue suit and a floppy yellow bowtie was introducing the BBC’s daily Clip from China, a fifteen minute programme broadcast on the instructions of the Commissariat in Brussels in order to improve relations between EUDCE and China, and to extend understanding of the Chinese people among the citizens of the United States of Europe.
‘We need to find some way of commemorating the great work of the leaders of the European Superstate,’ said the Chief Commissioner. ‘A new memorial for EUDCE. A celebration of our coming legacy. A remembrance of the great work done here. A grand memento that will leverage inspiration for the people for generations to come.’
‘That would be tremendously invigorating,’ agreed Sir Czardas. ‘Everyone would be enthused.’
‘Enthusing the people is what I do best,’ said the Chief Commissioner who was so out of touch that she genuinely believed this. She picked up a Mont Blanc pen and fiddled with it. Modesty, she believed, was either an affectation, to be despised, or an honest admission of mediocrity.
‘A wall plaque perhaps?’ suggested Sir Czardas, who always thought small. ‘A nice plaque fitted inside the entrance hall. You could unveil it a week on Saturday.’ He drew back a pair of small, imaginary curtains. ‘We could have your name inscribed on a nice oblong made of genuine plastic.’
‘Oh no,’ said the Chief Commissioner, shaking her head. ‘We need something much grander than that. Remember the Night Watch, that magnificent painting by whatshisname which commemorated those...’ she waved a hand, indicating that whoever they were they weren’t worth her struggling to remember. ‘Those people,’ she finished, rather lamely.
‘The painting hanging in the EUDCE President’s outer office?’ suggested Sir Czardas. ‘I think you will find it was by the Dutch painter, Rembrandt. He was commissioned to paint a Dutch Captain and a number of his militia men.’
‘That’s the one,’ agreed the Chief Commissioner who didn’t much like people showing that they knew more than she did. ‘Something like that but larger maybe. Or perhaps we could build a new Taj Mahal. It’s about time the world had an eighth wonder.’ She paused, her face flushed with excitement. ‘Would you like some afternoon tea?’
‘That would be very nice,’ agreed Sir Czardas. The sprouts all lived well (even the lower grade officials enjoyed a more than comfortable standard of living) but the Chief Commissioner lived particularly well. Her afternoon teas were legendary.
The Chief Commissioner pressed a button on the intercom on her desk, spoke to Clothilde, her personal assistant, a pretty young sprout in her early twenties who had no discernible secretarial skills but always wore very short black skirts and revealing, diaphanous white blouses which just happened to be a uniform the Chief Commissioner favoured, and ordered tea for two. She turned back to the Telescreen. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
The young man in the blue suit was standing in front of what looked like a massive army of soldiers standing to attention. ‘I’m standing in the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor of China which dates from 210 BC,’ the young man murmured in that quiet, reverential way that presenters have always favoured when reporting on royal funerals or when broadcasting from churches, museums and European Parliament buildings. ‘Behind me stands the terracotta army, an astonishing 8,000 individual figures, mainly soldiers, but also acrobats, musicians, strongmen and horse drawn chariots. Every member of this army stan
ds around two metres tall and the whole creation was built as a tribute, a glorification, a great memorial.’
‘That’s it!’ murmured the Chief Commissioner.
Sir Czardas looked at her.
‘The sculptors used eight basic face moulds and then used clay to create the soldiers’ facial expressions,’ continued the thin man in the blue suit.
There was a polite knock on the door.
‘Come!’ called the Chief Commissioner.
The Chief Commissioner’s personal assistant entered pushing a beautifully hand-carved oak tea trolley. On the top level of the trolley stood a solid silver tea pot, a solid silver sugar bowl with solid silver sugar tongs, a solid silver milk creamer (in the shape of a cow), a solid silver water jug, a solid silver tea strainer, solid silver cutlery and two cups, two saucers and two plates, all in rare 19th century Meissen porcelain. On the lower level of the trolley there were two three-tiered stands, each consisting of three plates connected by a silver rod and a single, larger Meissen plate. One set of tiered plates contained small triangular sandwiches with the crusts cut off and the other contained small fancy cakes. The single plate contained a large, uncut sponge cake and a solid silver cake knife.
‘The English used to have bread and butter at teatime,’ said the Chief Commissioner, as the personal assistant lifted the items off the trolley and placed them on the Chief Commissioner’s desk. ‘I never understood that,’ she said. ‘Why eat bread and butter when you could be eating cake?’
‘I think that is perhaps why the English are extinct,’ said Sir Czardas. ‘Their self-restraint eventually proved to be destructive.’
The Chief Commissioner thought about this for a moment, pursed her lips and then nodded. ‘You could be right.’
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