‘Will there be anything else you will be requiring?’ asked Clothilde, the personal assistant. She was from Estonia and spoke English with a very thick accent which the Chief Commissioner found most appealing. This was one of the few phrases she knew and she always managed to endow it with more meaning than might normally be expected. The Chief Commissioner, knowing that the personal assistant wouldn’t understand anything she said in reply, just smiled and waved her away.
‘Statues,’ said the Chief Commissioner with the great certainty of one who knows that her audience will agree wholeheartedly with whatever she says. ‘We will have our own statues made to celebrate EUDCE,’ she continued, having paused to watch the girl leave, and to enjoy the view. If she’d been alone she would have accidentally-on-purpose dropped a spoon so that she could tell the girl to pick it up. ‘They will be an ever-growing monument to our new State’s continuing and ever growing glory. A glorious tribute to the State’s munificence.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Sir Czardas, who would have enthused if the Chief Commissioner had suggested building a full-scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of oyster shells.
‘And I know just the person to create the sculptures for us!’ said the Chief Commissioner. She pointed at the bust of the young woman which stood on her windowsill. ‘Find the sculptor who created that bust,’ she said. ‘Put her in charge of the project.’
‘Do you know the sculptor?’ asked Sir Czardas.
‘I’m sure the bust must have been made by a woman,’ said the Chief Commissioner. ‘No man could have made something so beautiful.’
‘How will we find the name of the sculptor?’ asked Sir Czardas, nervously.
‘Lift it up,’ said the Chief Commissioner. ‘I seem to remember that there was something scratched on the underside.’ Sir Czardas stood up and moved across to the windowsill.
‘But be careful with it,’ warned the Chief Commissioner. ‘If you drop it I’ll have you posted to Scotland.’ She laughed lightly and selected a cucumber sandwich. ‘When you’ve done that you can be mother and pour the tea,’ she said, putting the sandwich whole into her mouth. Sir Czardas didn’t want to be posted to Scotland. Just that morning there had been yet another outbreak of rioting in Ville 723 (the town formerly known as Glasgow). Another group of Scottish nationalists had belatedly realised that their Parliament (the one they thought was a proper parliament and the first step to independence) was really just a EUDCE regional parliament and that their hopes of independence were now further away than they had been since the Union with England had been formally approved. When EUDCE had officially broken up Great Britain the Scottish nationalists had cheered and waved their saltire flags for days. It was taking some of them years to realise just how much they had been betrayed by the people they’d welcomed as saviours.
‘Certainly, ma’am,’ said Sir Czardas, who secretly adored strong women and fantasised that one day the Chief Commissioner would command him to clean her shoes with his tongue. He found the name on the bottom of the bust, and made a note of it in a small notebook with a silver pencil. He turned, just before he left. ‘And do you want me to do anything about the missing sprouts?’
‘Nothing,’ replied the Chief Commissioner, now clearly irritated by the question and the whole idea of missing sprouts. ‘They’ve probably taken unauthorised leave. Some of these people have no sense of loyalty or responsibility but we don’t want to advertise that fact. If we make a fuss we’ll upset people. We’ll demoralise the sprouts, who will worry, and the suspects will be concerned because some of their betters have gone missing.’ She gazed at the bust, which Sir Czardas had put back on the windowsill. She didn’t think he’d put it back in quite the right position. ‘And can you imagine the damage that would be done to our bonuses if people in Brussels thought that we were running such an unhappy ship that sprouts were actually leaving their posts?’
‘You don’t think they could have been...?’ Sir Czardas’s voice fell. He suddenly realised that he shouldn’t have started the question. The Chief Commissioner’s eyes seemed to bore right through him. He closed his eyes for a moment.
‘...could have been what?’ demanded the Chief Commissioner.
‘Er...killed? Murdered?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ snapped the Chief Commissioner. ‘Who would murder them? Sprouts aren’t going to kill sprouts. And suspects wouldn’t dare. And even if they did dare what would they do with the bodies? We control all the mortuaries and the cemeteries.’
‘There were those two bodies at the hospital,’ said Sir Czardas.
‘A road accident,’ said the Chief Commissioner with a wave of a hand. She pointed to the bust on her windowsill. ‘Just find the sculptor who made that bust,’ snapped the Chief Commissioner. ‘That’s what I want you to do.’ She nibbled at a sandwich. ‘And loop back to me just as soon as you’ve found her.’
She waited until Sir Czardas had gone and then stood up, moved to the windowsill and corrected the position of the bust a few millimetres. If you wanted something doing you really had to do it your self
Chapter 27
For the first couple of days Tom and Dorothy and Dalby and Gladwys waited for something to happen; for the sky to fall in, the earth to swallow them up. (Tom’s aunt had no fears, any more than she had expectations, ambitions or hopes. She lived for now, in a private world of the present, where time meant nothing.) If the sprouts had burst through their doors, they would have stood there unprotesting, waiting to be shot.
But, as the days went by, so they came to think that perhaps there would be no sudden bursting of the door lock under the weight of an enthusiastically wielded battering ram. (The security forces never knocked.)
And nothing happened.
There were no raids. No armed sprouts burst through their doors firing machine guns. There was no nerve gas sprayed through the windows. None of the ‘kill first, make up explanations later’ that had become official policy since the long ago days when the police had got away with shooting a tube train passenger in cold blood, and had realised that they could do exactly what they wanted and get away with it. (The police had discovered that without the sort of platform for dissent offered by a free press or an unregulated Internet – both of which were, thanks to EUDCE’s Strategic Freedoms Policy no more than distant memories – there was nothing for them to fear from using what they called ‘preventive techniques’ to control potential or suspected terrorists. ‘A well-shot suspect fires no guns and makes no complaints’ was a favourite maxim among Europol officers.)
The five of them and the cat met the following Saturday in a nearby park. They chose a spot near the lake where they could look out over the water towards a small island. There had been benches there but they had long gone; chopped up by people looking for wood to burn. Pieces of metal from the benches lay around, discarded and unwanted. The park was now almost empty of trees and the larger bushes had all gone; taken for burning. Even the island was bare of trees and bushes. Only grass and weeds grew there now, though some of the weeds were five or six feet high. Within the main part of the park the grass had spread over what had once been beautiful ornamental flowerbeds. Only the paths, wide ribbons of tarmacadam, now decorated with bunches of grass and weed which had broken through the surface, remained of the original park.
There was a small exception.
There was one small part of the park that remained as it had once been; a small section that could be seen from offices belonging to senior sprouts.
Three gardeners, all suspects, worked on this small segment of garden to keep it looking smart and pretty. The area was fenced off so that other suspects couldn’t walk on the paths, see the flowers or interfere with the view from the sprouts’ offices.
In the old days there had been ducks and swans on the lake. Tom had often stopped to feed the birds pieces of bread as he’d strolled through the park, especially on cold winter days when there was little for them to eat. Occasionally, there had been young mothers
with small children, cosy in thick coats, scarves and hats, holding bags full of pieces of torn up bread, standing by the waterside. But there had been no waterfowl in the park for a long time. They had long since been caught, cooked and eaten. Even the pigeons in the park had gone. All killed and eaten. Only the occasional hardy, sparrow remained; ever nervous, ever watchful. Alive only because the meat on a sparrow isn’t worth the catching. You’d use up more energy catching one than you’d obtain by eating one.
‘Do you think we got away with it?’ whispered Gladwys. Even sitting in the park she was nervous. She had good reason to be. The BBC had, that morning, broadcast news that a group of 500 suspects who had been accused of Respect Deficit had been deported to Africa to work on one of Monsanto-Goldman-Sach’s EUDCE croplands. The suspects were shown boarding the converted tanker that would take them on their one-way journey. The newsreader had described, with undisguised relish, the terrible conditions on the vessel and the equally bad conditions which awaited the deportees when they arrived at their destination. (Respect Deficit was a common charge. Any sprout who felt that he had not been treated with sufficient respect could make the charge. It was well-known that whenever the farms needed more labourers the sprouts would be encouraged to bring charges if a suspect so much as failed to lower his eyes when spoken to.)
‘I think so,’ said Tom.
The four of them stood in silence for a while, staring at the lake. The water was thick and sludgy and it stank. Tom’s aunt had wandered off and, together with Tabatha, was watching one of the lonely sparrows.
‘So,’ said Dalby. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Two choices,’ said Tom. ‘First choice: we retire while we’re ahead. Think ourselves lucky and keep our heads down.’
‘And hope the sprouts leave us alone,’ said Dalby.
‘And hope the sprouts leave us alone,’ agreed Dorothy.
‘Which they won’t,’ sighed Dalby.
‘Which they certainly will not,’ agreed Dorothy.
‘Or?’ said Gladwys.
‘Second choice: we decide that we’re not going to let the sprouts continue to bully us and run our lives.’
‘Does that mean what I suspect it means?’ asked Gladwys. ‘That we prepare to kill some more sprouts when they cause us trouble?’
‘More than that,’ said Tom. ‘That’s more of a halfway house. Call it the second option. And if that’s the second option then there’s a third option.’
The others looked at him.
‘We kill sprouts who are causing other people trouble.’
‘A sort of revolution,’ said Dalby.
Tom nodded. ‘A sort of revolution.’
They looked out at the stinking lake and for a while no one spoke.
‘This used to be beautiful,’ said Gladwys at last. ‘I used to come here all the time. I remember there were fish in the water. The water was so clear you could see them swimming around.’
‘We were lucky with those six,’ said Dalby. ‘No one saw us kill them. No one saw us get rid of the bodies. No one seemed to notice that six sprouts were missing. I can’t help feeling that killing more is going to be dangerous.’
‘I don’t care if it is dangerous,’ said Dorothy. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you but I don’t honestly feel I have all that much to lose. It’s not been much of a life recently.’
The other three thought about this for a while. But it wasn’t a point of view with which they felt able to disagree.
‘You have to have something to believe in,’ said Tom. ‘This has given me a new lease of life. I want to kill as many of them as possible. Ridding the world of the vermin.’
‘But won’t the Commissioners simply recruit more?’ asked Gladwys.
‘If your kitchen is infested with cockroaches do you leave them and say there is no point in killing them because more will come, or do you try and wipe them out?’
‘So, what do we do now?’ asked Dalby.
‘If we want to start a revolution we need more people,’ said Tom. ‘We can’t make a real difference by ourselves. You can’t start a revolution with four people.’
‘Five if we count your aunt,’ said Dorothy, pointing at Tom’s aunt.
‘Five,’ agreed Tom. His aunt had found a large branch in the thick weeds. The branch was bigger than she was but she was dragging it back towards them so that they could take it home for firewood.
‘We need to find people who think the way we do...’ began Gladwys.
‘...that’s everyone!’ interrupted Dalby. ‘All the suspects.’
‘...yes, I agree,’ continued Gladwys. ‘But we need to find people who think the way we do and are prepared to do something; prepared to stand up and try to make a difference.’ She looked at Dalby. ‘And that’s not everyone!’
‘No, you’re right,’ Dalby agreed. ‘We need a revolutionary army!’
The others looked at him.
‘Sort of thing,’ he said, suddenly embarrassed.
‘We can’t have an old-fashioned revolution.’
‘No. They’ve got too many guns.’
‘We have to kill them one at a time.’
There was a pause and a long silence.
‘How long do you think it would take?’
‘We’ve got nothing else to do.’
‘How many people do you think we could get together?’
Dalby and Gladwys looked at each other, murmuring possible names. Tom and Dorothy did the same.
‘We know a dozen, maybe 15,’ said Dalby.
‘We can probably manage something near to that,’ said Tom.
‘We need somewhere to meet,’ said Dorothy. ‘We can’t have that many people in one of our homes.’
‘And we can’t meet outside in the street,’ said Dalby. ‘What about an empty shop or an old warehouse? There are plenty of those around?’
‘They’re all known to the sprouts and they’re all under surveillance,’ said Tom.
‘We need a building which is guaranteed to be empty at night and which won’t be under constant surveillance,’ said Dorothy, thoughtfully. ‘Somewhere which we know won’t be bugged.’
‘Sproutland!’ said Tom’s aunt.
They all looked at her.
‘The sprout buildings don’t have cameras in them,’ she said.
‘She’s right!’ said Tom. He put his arm around his aunt, pulled her to him and gave her a big kiss on the cheek. ‘The police station closes at 5 p.m. They don’t have any cameras inside. They took them all out after the fuss that was made when a group of suspects were beaten to death.’ The inquiry into the revelations of police brutality had recommended that all CCTV cameras be removed from the police stations to protect the privacy of serving police officers.
‘But they might have bugs,’ said Dalby. ‘I can think of somewhere even better!’
‘Where?’
‘The Regional Parliament,’ said Dalby. ‘The buildings all close at 5 p.m. and shut at weekends. No one ever works there in the evenings.’
‘I bet they’re warm too!’ said Gladwys.
‘Can we get in?’ asked Dalby. ‘Don’t they have tons of security?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Dorothy. ‘How many people want to break into the Regional Parliament building?’
Chapter 28
Tom and Dalby broke into the building the following evening. It was astonishingly easy.
The Regional Parliament building had been built several decades earlier, but had been kept a secret for many years. There was no little irony in the fact that at the same time as ordinary citizens were losing their right to privacy so the State was constantly shrouding everything it did in layers of secrecy and deceit. EUDCE had reversed the natural order of things. Once, everything individuals did was their business, and their business alone, while everything their government did on their behalf was public business. The rise and rise of the European Union, and EUDCE, had turned things upside down, inside out and back to front.
&nb
sp; Politicians at the House of Commons had kept quiet about the unelected Regional Parliaments, which had been built, under instructions from what had then been known as the European Union. They had, of course, all been part of the plan to replace the United Kingdom in general, and England in particular, with a series of political regions. The Parliaments had, like everything else prepared for the European Union, been built without consideration for cost. European Regional Parliamentary buildings in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London had, one by one, and with a great fanfare of publicity, been opened as examples of just how the central Government was giving back power to the people. Few had realised that these Parliaments were merely a physical manifestation of power moving not towards the regions, and towards the people, but towards Brussels and towards the bureaucrats. Few had realised that London would soon be renamed Ville 4178.
The European Union had found it remarkably easy to take over the United Kingdom. Under the guidance of home-grown politicians who had been bribed and flattered into submission, the nation had lain back and abandoned itself to defeat and total domination without a gun being fired. The nation which had conquered the world and ruled an empire had disappeared and been replaced by a series of anonymous regions. Cromwell’s Parliament, which had shown the model for parliaments elsewhere, had, knowingly and apparently with enthusiasm, and the approval of a trusting monarch, committed suicide. The Parliament where Churchill had argued and fought was now empty and silent. The nation, and the monarchy, for which millions had lain down their lives, was now merely a small and insignificant part of the new European Superstate.
It was easy to break into the building because no one working for the European Superstate imagined for one moment that anyone would break in. Why would they? There was nothing much to steal. There were no secrets to take. The Regional Parliaments were merely local rubber stamps for the European Commission, the powerhouse of Europe, and that edentulous homage to democracy, the European Parliament.
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