Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘So tell them,’ said Philip. But he was then struck by a sudden suspicion. ‘You have decided, haven’t you?’

  ‘I thought I had. I was pretty sure I was going to vote for Remain.’

  Philip waited. ‘But …?’ he prompted.

  ‘Well, it’s complicated, isn’t it? There are a lot of different arguments on both sides.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I’ve been doing some research online. There are so many things to take into account. Sovereignty, immigration, trading partnerships, the Maastricht Agreement, the Lisbon Treaty, the Common Agricultural Policy, the European Court, the Commission – I mean, the Commission has far too much power, doesn’t it? There’s a real democratic deficit in the European institutions.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you’re well up to speed on this. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’m not up to speed at all. I’m drowning in information and contradictory opinions. I’ve been reading about this for three days. I’ve got forty-seven different tabs open on my computer.’

  ‘How much do they want you to write? A thousand words, two thousand?’

  ‘No, it’s only fifty words. They’ve asked dozens of writers, they don’t have much space.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Benjamin – you’ve spent three days on fifty words? That’s crazy. Are they paying you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I forgot to ask.’

  Philip was losing patience. ‘Just do what everyone else is going to do – vote with your gut. Do you want to be on the same side as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, then – there you go.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not good enough, is it? This whole thing’s ridiculous. It’s all so complicated. How’s anybody supposed to decide?’ Reflecting on the absurdity of it, he lost concentration and jumped a red light and attracted an angry chorus of horns. ‘Oh, shit. Anyway, I’m nearly at the station now – I’d better go.’

  ‘Righto,’ said Philip. ‘Glad to have been of help.’

  *

  Charlie looked terrible. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t washed his hair, hadn’t slept, hadn’t cleaned his teeth, and hadn’t stopped drinking for about thirty-six hours. It was after eleven when they arrived back at Benjamin’s house. Charlie grabbed a bottle of white wine from the kitchen, unscrewed the cap without waiting to ask and took it out on to the terrace. Benjamin followed with a couple of glasses. If there was any kind of moon that night, it was hidden behind banks of thick cloud, and it was too cold – in Benjamin’s opinion – to be drinking outside.

  ‘She’s kicked me out again,’ Charlie said, once they were sitting at the table. ‘And she says it’s final this time.’

  ‘You can stay here for a while,’ said Benjamin.

  Charlie didn’t appear to be listening. ‘I shall have to find somewhere to live,’ he said.

  ‘You can stay here,’ said Benjamin. ‘There’s plenty of room.’

  ‘How am I supposed to find somewhere to live? I’m only earning about fifty quid a week at the moment. And they won’t give me benefits while I’m earning.’

  ‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘I always wanted us to be a family, you know? I always saw us as a family. The three of us. That’s all I ever wanted. But she doesn’t see it like that. Never has. She hates the fact that me and Neeqs are so close. She thinks we’re in some sort of conspiracy against her or … I don’t know. Something worse. She’s paranoid, she’s aggressive, she’s incredibly unhappy, and as usual she’s taking it out on me.’

  ‘Maybe she could get some help?’ Benjamin said. ‘Professional help?’

  ‘There’s no way that can happen,’ said Charlie. ‘She won’t listen to me. She won’t even let me back in the house.’

  ‘She can’t stop you seeing Aneeqa, and helping her, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Neeqs’ll be at uni before I know it. Glasgow, she’s applied to. Glasgow! Fucking miles away.’

  ‘Then maybe she doesn’t need you any more. Maybe it’s time to let it all go.’

  ‘Fucking … BITCH,’ said Charlie, and picked up his wine glass but seized it so violently in his unsteady hand that it shattered in his grasp. There was blood everywhere and Benjamin had to run off to find the First Aid box. He persuaded Charlie it was time to go to sleep and when he peeped around his bedroom door half an hour later he saw that he was crashed out on the bed fast asleep, fully clothed and with all the lights on.

  Early on the morning of the next day, Wednesday 15 June, it began to rain heavily. Charlie didn’t surface until one o’clock in the afternoon. Benjamin made some lunch for him but then couldn’t find him. He looked everywhere. Charlie’s bag was still in his room, but he was nowhere to be seen. An hour later he texted to say that he’d gone for a walk, and he would be back in time for dinner, and Benjamin was not to worry. The rain continued, unabated. Benjamin sat in the window bay, and watched through the rain-spattered glass as the river began to rise, the water splashing and pushing angrily through the mill’s man-made channel like a queue of bad-tempered commuters trying to squeeze through the ticket barrier of a crowded station. The noise of the rain and the noise of the river became a loud, relentless backdrop to his thoughts as he wrote and rewrote his newspaper contribution in his head and worried about Charlie. Towards the end of the afternoon he tried to distract himself by making an elaborate curry.

  When Charlie returned, at six o’clock, he was, unsurprisingly, wet through. He went upstairs for a long, hot bath and a change of clothes. Over dinner he was much calmer than he’d been the night before. Benjamin started to feel that he was almost too calm. He was evidently in the midst of a deep depression, and spoke very little. When he did speak, it was about money. ‘I thought going for that walk would help me think things through,’ he said, ‘but it all comes down to money. Without money, I can’t see my way out. And it’s been like this for years. Fucking years. They keep saying it’s going to get easier. That there’s light at the end of the tunnel. How long is this fucking tunnel? Where’s the fucking light? I’ve been plugging away at this for six years now. Six years on the party circuit. Fucking Duncan Field earns three times as much as me. Four times. Kids would rather see his stupid smoke bombs and explosions any day of the week. I don’t know why I bother.’ After a long, long pause, he looked pleadingly at Benjamin and said: ‘Can I have a drink, mate?’

  ‘Don’t you think you had enough yesterday?’ Benjamin said.

  ‘Oh, come on. Just the one.’

  Benjamin nodded. ‘Help yourself.’

  Charlie poured himself a whisky.

  Benjamin went to bed early. Charlie said that he was ready for bed as well, but he wanted to phone Yasmin first. Even from his bathroom, Benjamin could hear that the conversation was going badly, and was quickly deteriorating into a shouting match. When it was over there was a loud bang (Charlie slamming the phone down on a table?) and then the sound of a door opening and closing. Benjamin went into his bedroom, opened the window and looked out. It was another moonless night. Rain continued to sheet down. He could make out Charlie’s tall, heavy, shadowy figure as he paced backwards and forwards down below. And then, in a sudden, decisive movement, he climbed up on to the top of the terrace wall. He stood there, in the pouring rain, looking down into the swirling, gushing, furious water as it pounded by beneath him.

  Benjamin screamed: ‘Charlie! What the hell are you doing? Get down from there!’

  Charlie didn’t move. Oblivious to the rain drenching him from head to foot, he remained standing on the wall, and then stretched out his arms, as if attempting to balance, or perhaps preparing to dive.

  ‘Charlie!’

  Twenty or thirty seconds went by.

  ‘Charlie! Get down!’

  Slowly, as if he had heard Benjamin’s voice for the first time, Charlie turned his head. He looked up at his friend. His face was pale and haggard. Tears streaked
down his cheeks.

  They stared at each other like that for a minute or more, Benjamin pleading, Charlie staring with sightless eyes, as if he were a sleepwalker and all this was happening in a dream.

  Then, carefully, he turned around, stooped down and jumped back on to the terrace. He stayed there, squatting on his haunches, head in hands, until Benjamin came clanging down the metal steps, put his arm around his shoulder and helped him back inside.

  *

  The next morning, Charlie was up and dressed by nine o’clock. Benjamin was frying eggs in the kitchen when he appeared in the doorway, with his coat on and his bag already packed.

  He said: ‘Time to leave you in peace, I think.’

  Benjamin said: ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Think I’ll go and stay with my mom for a while.’

  Benjamin nodded.

  ‘Have some breakfast and I’ll drive you to the station.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll walk to the village. Get a bus. At least the rain’s stopped.’

  ‘True.’

  They hugged.

  ‘Thanks for everything, mate.’

  After he’d gone, Benjamin turned on the television. It was tuned to the BBC News Channel. He kept it on all morning, in the background. There was an item about Nigel Farage, who was unveiling the new poster for the Leave.EU campaign. It showed a long, winding queue of young people, mainly men, mainly dark-skinned. They were meant to be migrants, obviously. Splashed across the image, in big red capitals, were the two words: ‘BREAKING POINT’. In smaller type, it also said: ‘The EU has failed us all’ and ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.’

  Benjamin actually shuddered at the crude, unapologetic xenophobia of the image. It was the ugliest thing he had seen yet in this ugly campaign. As soon as he saw it, he knew that his mind was made up. Deciding to waste no more time on his public declaration, he forgot all about the nuanced, even-handed words he had been wrestling with for the last few days, typed out a brisk, decisive, fifty-word statement and emailed it to the newspaper.

  The telephone rang. It was his father. Although his pronunciation had become unclear since the mini-stroke, there was no mistaking the unaccustomed note of jauntiness in his voice.

  ‘Guess where I’ve been?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, where you’ve been? You didn’t leave the house, did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I voted. I took that form you gave me and filled it in and I posted it.’

  Benjamin was horrified. ‘Dad, you shouldn’t have walked all the way to the postbox by yourself. Lois or I could have done that for you. The doctors told you to take it easy.’

  ‘That was weeks ago.’

  ‘How did you vote?’ Benjamin asked, although he was already pretty sure of the answer.

  ‘Leave, of course.’ Defiantly, he added: ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’

  ‘What about Sophie?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘You know she wanted you to vote the other way. It’s her future, you know. She’s the one who’s going to be around the longest.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl but she’s very naive. I’ve done her a favour. She’ll thank me one day.’

  ‘How are you feeling after the walk, anyway?’

  ‘A bit tired. I think I’ll have a sit down for a while.’

  ‘OK. Lois is coming round about four, all right?’

  ‘Perfect. I’ll have my nap and then we can have a cup of tea.’

  ‘OK. ’Bye, Dad.’

  ‘’Bye, son.’

  Disheartened by the conversation, Benjamin turned back to the television. Farage was standing in front of the poster now, beaming and joking with the various camera crews. At the bottom of the screen, a selection of the morning’s tweets was scrolling by. One of them was from the novelist Robert Harris. It said:

  How foul this referendum is. The most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime. May there never be another.

  Amen to that, Benjamin thought.

  *

  Early that same afternoon – the afternoon of 16 June 2016 – Lois was in the kitchen, writing a shopping list. She planned to call at the Longbridge branch of Marks & Spencer on the way to her father’s house. She had the radio on, tuned to Radio Two, but she was not paying it much attention. The music was bland, and she had given up listening to the news, being sick of the referendum by now: like everyone else, it seemed.

  Shortly after two o’clock, however, there was an item of breaking news which brought her afternoon to a halt. A member of parliament had been attacked in her constituency; attacked in the street as she walked to her local library, where she had been intending to hold a surgery.

  Lois had never heard of the MP. Her name was Jo Cox. She was the MP for Batley and Spen, a constituency in Yorkshire. A young woman. The attack sounded horrific. She had been both shot and stabbed by her assailant. As he attacked her he had shouted some wild, seemingly incoherent words which were later reported to have been a cry of ‘Britain first. This is for Britain.’ A passer-by had run to give help and had also been stabbed. The attacker had walked off casually but a few minutes later had surrendered himself to the police. Jo Cox herself had been rushed to hospital in a critical condition.

  As soon as she heard this news, Lois felt a terrible sickness, dizziness and fatigue come over her. She turned the radio off and went into the sitting room, where she lay down on the sofa. Within a few minutes she had a raging thirst and the beginnings of a headache. She went back into the kitchen and drank a glass of cold water and took two painkillers and turned on the radio again. There was no further news about the wounded MP except that police were due to give a press conference shortly after five o’clock.

  Shaking uncontrollably, Lois placed her laptop on the kitchen table, turned it on and googled Jo Cox. A married mother of two. Forty-one years old – forty-two next week. Popular local MP, who had been elected for the first time little more than a year earlier and had increased the Labour majority. Founder of the All Parliamentary Friends of Syria group. Remain supporter. Working on a report called The Geography of Anti-Muslim Hatred.

  Lois knew that she should not try to imagine the details of the attack, but she couldn’t help herself. An ordinary day – insofar as any day was ordinary at this extraordinary time – and a routine task: walking towards a library, along a familiar street, in the company of your manager and your case worker. And then the stabbing, the shooting, the frenzy. Everyday life suddenly obliterated, rendered meaningless, by unpredictable, murderous violence. That night in November 1974 … Lois stood up quickly – too quickly – then closed her eyes and felt herself swooning, falling … Gradually the room came into focus again. She leaned against the kitchen table for support. From the way the attack had been described on the radio, it sounded as though no one could survive it, but surely it was impossible for anyone to be killed in such circumstances. A local MP, going about her daily business on a typical Thursday, at lunchtime – it couldn’t happen. Lois clung to this hope – fully aware of how irrational it was – as the minutes dragged by and she waited to hear what the police had to say.

  She turned on the television at five o’clock. The press conference began a couple of minutes later. A middle-aged officer, with her thin, gingery hair combed severely forward on to her forehead, talked in a grave monotone above the constant noise of camera flash bulbs.

  ‘Just before one o’clock today,’ she began, ‘Jo Cox, MP for Batley and Spenborough, was attacked in Market Street, Birstall. I am now very sad to have to report …’

  Lois gasped and screwed her eyes tight shut.

  ‘… that she has died as a result of her injuries.’

  ‘No, no, no, no, NO!’ she wailed, and threw herself down on the sofa. He body was racked with sobs. ‘No!’ she kept saying, again and again. ‘No, no, NO!’ Then she stood up and yelled at the TV screen: ‘You stup
id people!’ She strode over to the window and looked out at the quiet street and shouted, louder than ever: ‘You stupid people – letting this happen!’ She went over to the coffee table and grabbed a newspaper and crumpled it into a ball and threw it at the television and for the next few minutes she was kicking furniture, throwing cushions, pounding the walls with her fists. She smashed a vase and soaked the carpet with water. How long the fit lasted, she couldn’t say. Eventually she blacked out.

  It was about ten to six when she started clearing up. It was an oddly calming activity, and she had almost finished by the time Christopher came home.

  ‘What’s been going on here?’ he asked, when he noticed first of all the state of the house, and then the state of Lois herself. He hugged her tightly and she started shaking again when she asked him: ‘Didn’t you hear?’

  ‘About the MP? Yes, I heard.’

  He kissed the top of her head, taking in the scent of her hair, as he savoured the unusual pleasure of having his wife cling to him. ‘It’s so sad, isn’t it? I know how it makes you feel. I know what it brings back.’

  They embraced for a few minutes, until Lois’s composure had more or less returned. She sat down at the kitchen table and he continued to stand over her, stroking her hair.

  ‘How was your father?’ he asked at last. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.’

  ‘Dad …’ said Lois. ‘Oh shit – I forgot all about him.’

  ‘Really? Hasn’t he phoned?’

  ‘No. I’d better go over there now.’

  ‘I’ll come with you. I don’t want you driving when you’re like this.’

  ‘I was going to get some food on the way.’

  ‘Let’s get there first. I can always pop out and get something.’

  Lois went to fetch her coat from the cloakroom and said, abstractedly: ‘I can’t believe I forgot about him.’ She took one last look at the television before turning it off. ‘That poor woman … Those poor children …’

  ‘Do you think we should call him?’