But there were certainly three deer there, and tri-coloured was certainly how she remembered them: one brown, one white, one black, like those threes that kept recurring in the fairy tales that Caitlin liked her to read at bedtime: three sisters, three dogs with enormous eyes, three times that the same event happened, but then something extra happening the third time, after the first two had set up the pattern. She and the deer looked at each other across a space of twenty yards. They knew she was alive, and she knew they were. Apart from that, they were mysteries to one another.
She wouldn’t tell anyone about them, but then there were many things she didn’t talk about. How much she missed Caitlin, for instance. Or what it was like afterwards, when the lorry had— ‘No, no, no!’ she muttered. Pongo growled. The three deer started and bolted back among the trees. A fallen twig broke with a snap beneath their hooves, and a crow in their path took flight, its rasping cry echoing among the trees.
She began to roll a second spliff, more as something to occupy herself than because she really needed any more of the drug in her bloodstream. And as she did so she heard a familiar roar from behind the trees to the east where the deer had disappeared, as though there was some great beast in there which they’d awakened. The roar grew louder until, as she’d known would happen, a huge plane with swept-back wings appeared above the tops of the trees, black against the flat grey sky. It was very low, its eight jet engines shrieking as it descended towards the airbase a few miles to the west. Grey wisps of cloud broke over its wings, like waves over a boat in rough sea.
She often saw these planes when she came to the forest. She saw them in Breckham too, flying over her back garden. American bases were part of life at that time along the border between Norfolk and Suffolk and had been for sixty years. Local women formed relationships, as Cheryl had done, with American servicemen who often came from rural, Trump-voting towns that were in many ways quite like Breckham. Michelle had once been out with a taciturn pilot from Illinois called Brett. Cheryl herself was the child of such a relationship. So the bomber wasn’t an alien thing to Michelle. These warplanes were a familiar part of her world and they usually only impinged on her consciousness as a noise nuisance. But this time, as it disappeared behind her, she felt as if this enormous black screaming thing had left in its wake a kind of wasteland.
It wasn’t that anything had visibly changed. The trees were still trees, the grass was still moving this way and that in the little gusts and eddies of the air. And after the shriek of those huge jets had shrunk into a distant whine, the sounds she could hear were the same as they had been before as well. But somehow the forest’s meaning had been stripped away, along with its ability to comfort and reassure. And, as Michelle lit her second spliff, she thought about a conversation she’d had with Jules when they met up earlier in the week. Jules was eighteen, the daughter of her brother Trevor and his second wife, and was seen as the smart one in her generation of the family, just as Michelle had been in the generation before her. She and Michelle had always been close and, when her parents’ marriage was breaking up two years ago, Jules had lived with Michelle for several months. But now she’d got herself a place at uni in Leicester to study Marketing, and would be leaving Breckham the following year.
When she came over to Michelle’s that week, Jules had talked about a book she’d just finished reading about ‘global warming’. And, in the strange meaningless emptiness the screaming plane had left behind, Michelle thought about the melting ice, the fires, the islands sinking beneath the sea . . .
‘Cheryl’s wrong,’ she murmured to her dog. ‘I’ll be doing everyone a favour if I stay on my own and never have a kid again.’
I’ve looked at a lot of pictures of Michelle. There are hundreds of them in the extraordinarily comprehensive social media archive we possess today thanks to the mania for data collection of what was then the People’s Republic of China. I’ve even found some short video clips. I can certainly see why Harry found her attractive. And I like her too. I like the dry little comments she makes on her friends’ posts on Facebook: their pictures of their dogs or cats or their children, the jokes they’ve recycled from elsewhere in the internet, their blurry pictures of boozy evenings out. Once in a while she posts a picture of something she’s made: an arrangement of leaves and twigs, or one of the cartoon drawings she does of regular customers at Shear Perfection, or a second-hand mirror she’s bought and done up by painting it gold and gluing little glass beads round it. Her comments are always self-deprecating – ‘Bought this mirror for a tenner. Reckon they’ll take it back for five?’ – and I can see in those comments, and in her face as well, the quality that Harry refers to as wariness, the sense he has of her peeking out from a hiding place. And yet the way she peeks out is friendly and kind.
There’s no evidence in the archive that Michelle is particularly interested in politics. She never says anything political herself, but occasionally she will pass on something one of her friends has posted, or respond with a little picture (they were called ‘emojis’) of a face crying with laughter, or the acronym LOL, which stands for ‘laugh out loud’. Her brother Trevor will occasionally make an overtly political statement, always unsophisticated, sometimes poorly spelt, and invariably attached as a comment to some image already circulating on social media. Photos of him show a big, heavy man, ruddy-faced from outdoor work and with a smile that his sisters and mother apparently think of as mischievous and jolly, but which to my eyes contains a great deal of anger not very far below the surface. ‘We voted for it! Why don’t they get their fucking finger out and make it happen!’ he posts at one point, to which Michelle, her sister Jen and their mother Kath all dutifully append a LOL, even though it wasn’t really a joke. Another time he posts an American cartoon in which a naive young woman welcomes a dark-skinned man in a turban to her country by holding up a placard that reads ‘All immigrants welcome!’ only to have him slice her head off with a sword. Michelle puts a cry-with-laughter emoji in response (something that would undoubtedly trouble Harry a great deal), and her sister adds a LOL, but neither of them comment or recycle his post. The same happens when he posts a picture of the president of the European Commission looking drunk: ‘And they want this clown in charge? Seriously?’
LOL, LOL, LOL, go Michelle, Jen and Kath.
NINE
On the second day of that Suffolk weekend back in August, Richard, Karina, Ellie, Phil and Harry had walked along the shingly beach near the drowned medieval city of Dunwich. As they walked and talked, Harry and Richard found themselves ahead of the others. They discovered they were both keen squash players and, without particularly meaning it, Harry had said, ‘We ought to meet up for a game sometime.’ Richard had seemed no more enthusiastic than he was and Harry hadn’t bothered to follow up: he had enough squash partners and enough friends too. But, to Harry’s surprise, a few days after his return from Breckham, Richard contacted him and they arranged to meet in the upmarket gym of which Richard was a member. (The building still stands, although, like many former public buildings, it was converted to basic residential accommodation under the Protectorate, when the rising Thames necessitated the evacuation of some of the lower parts of London.)
Short-legged, potbellied Richard certainly didn’t look like much of an athlete, but he made up in sheer determination what he lacked in finesse and inflicted a very thorough defeat on Harry. They retired to the changing rooms where, as Harry records in his diary, he discovered that Richard had ‘one of those stubby little dicks and was covered all over with orange hair: chest, back, shoulders, everywhere, like an orang-utan’. Confident, dynamic Richard clearly made him feel insecure.
They had a drink together afterwards. The bar at Richard’s gym had soft lights and greenish decor, the barman in shadow against a lavish cornucopia of gleaming glass and golden liquids.
‘So, remind me, what kind of work have you got on at the moment?’ Richard, who seemed intensely curious about everything, kept leaning forwa
rd as if not to miss the smallest nuance of what Harry had to say. Leaning back as far as possible, Harry replied that it was basically kitchen extensions and garden studios.
Richard frowned. ‘And is that still fulfilling after all these years? It doesn’t become a bit samey?’
Harry’s hackles rose. ‘It does sometimes. But don’t all jobs have their boring side?’
Richard shrugged. ‘I can’t bear boredom. If I get bored of something, I either stop doing it or hire someone else to do it for me. Did you never think of trying something new? I gather from Phil that your ex runs a pretty successful events business. You’ve not thought of doing anything like that yourself?’
‘I’m just not into that kind of thing,’ Harry said. He wondered whether to mention his painting but decided against it. It would lead immediately to sharp but unwelcome questions about what he was working on (answer: nothing much), what successes he’d had so far in terms of public recognition (answer: none) and what steps he was taking to take his painting to a marketable level (answer: nothing at all). And while Richard was perfectly entitled to be puzzled why a bright man like Harry hadn’t got his sort of drive and ambition, Harry decided he was equally entitled to find Richard somewhat exhausting.
He asked Richard about his own work. Richard told him that, while he’d now built up a huge amount of experience of the financial world, he was already past his intellectual peak. ‘What I’m doing now is headhunting bright young mathematicians from half a dozen top universities. I offer them a very good package. I provide them with the structure and the contacts they need to monetize their talents from the off, and if they stay with me I make sure they’re very well rewarded. I’m the equivalent of a football player who’s moved into management. In the middle part of your life, first-order skills are no longer your strongest suit and you need to adjust.’
Harry felt a need to change the subject. ‘So . . . anyway. How about Brexit?’
‘What an utter shambles,’ Richard growled. ‘What a total clusterfuck. History won’t forgive the idiots who made this happen.’
(‘History won’t forgive them’ is fairly common in the archive. I always smile when I see it. Did they really think we’d be adults who could settle their childish quarrel, and not just more children like themselves?)
Harry knew that the idiots Richard was referring to were the politicians who called the referendum in the first place and the leaders of the successful Leave campaign, but in order to lift the conversation out of this well-worn groove, he pretended to misunderstand. ‘What? All seventeen million of them?’
Richard examined him, sucking on his lips. ‘Well, since you ask, my faith in British people in general has taken quite a blow. Karina’s just come back from a book do in Berlin and she says that, surrounded by all those puzzled, reasonable Europeans, she felt thoroughly ashamed to be British. I mean, for Christ’s sake, this wasn’t rocket science! Everyone who actually knows anything at all about the economy explained repeatedly during the campaign that leaving would be a disaster. And yet, like a herd of moronic lemmings, our dear compatriots trooped out and voted for it anyway. Crass stupidity. Stupidity and gullibility, seasoned with racism, garnished with narrow provincial insularity, and stirred into a broth of toxic nostalgia for Empire by a motley crew of bigots and opportunists.’
Patient reasonable Europeans . . . ignorant backward-looking Leave voters . . . It was a familiar narrative to Harry and one of which literally millions of iterations can be found in the archive. But as he listened to Richard it struck Harry that it wasn’t really a new narrative and that it actually predated Brexit. He thought about all those conversations about how European plumbers were so much more reliable than the British ones, European service workers so much more polite and friendly and interesting than rude and uneducated Brits. He even remembered saying such things himself: ‘They’re such nice people. They work so hard!’ And each time he’d experienced a sort of tiny endorphin hit of self-satisfaction, as if being awarded some sort of prize.
‘If you’re anything like me,’ he said, ‘you probably don’t know many Leave voters.’
‘Oh, I know enough of them. There are quite a few in the City: eccentrics who just like to be different, the odd reactionary idiot who wants the whole country to become another Channel Island, and the occasional psycho who wants to make a few million by shorting the entire British economy. I don’t talk to any of them if I can possibly help it. For their sake and mine.’
‘They don’t sound very typical of Leave voters in general.’
Richard snorted. ‘They’re not. They’re intelligent people. Most Leave voters are thick.’
‘A bit of a sweeping generalization, don’t you think? There are seventeen million of them, after all!’
Once again Richard examined Harry’s face for several seconds, chewing on his lower lip and breathing rather noisily through his large hairy nostrils. ‘I wish I could agree with you, but I’m afraid it really is rather simple. We live in a nation full of bigoted, mean-minded morons, who are scared of change, incapable of rational thought, and can’t accept that the world has moved on since the nineteen fifties.’
‘We had the financial crash in 2008. Ordinary folk have seen very rich people, including people who were responsible for the crash, doing very nicely since then, while they—’
‘That makes no sense, Harry. If someone is already unhappy about the economic situation why on earth would they choose to make things ten times worse? It’s been hard for a lot of people, no doubt, not helped by the shitty Tory government, but I promise you that what they’ve been living through is an absolute picnic compared with how it’s going to be for them if this shitstorm goes down.’
‘I suppose if you’re tired of being ignored or taken for granted by the people who run things, you might enjoy voting for something that you know they really really don’t want.’
Richard sighed. ‘That’s a lovely, kind gloss to put on things, Harry, and I’ve heard it many times, but if you look at the data, that really isn’t the reason people give for voting Leave. They want fewer foreigners here, they want to “take back control”, they want to bring home the three hundred and fifty million pounds they’ve been mendaciously told the EU takes from them every week, they want to get Brussels off their backs and “have their country back”.’
He shook his head. ‘Of course if you tell them Brussels doesn’t take three hundred and fifty million, which they could easily have found out for themselves, or if you explain to them that our economy needs migrants to be able to continue to function at all, they just block their ears. And the worst part is that when you ask them what exactly this wonderful thing is that they can’t do now but are going to be able to do when we’re outside the EU, they don’t fucking know, because they don’t know the first thing about what the EU does at the moment, and have never even bothered to find out.’
‘I guess most people vote with their gut,’ Harry said. ‘I know I did. I’m more or less a total ignoramus when it comes to economics. I voted Remain because I liked the idea that European countries that have fought each other for centuries have come together in a peaceful union. I found that comforting. When I was on the Continent, I enjoying seeing all the different national emblems on the back of the same Euro coins. But, when it comes to the economic arguments, I have to admit I pretty much accepted on trust that membership of the Union was important for Britain’s prosperity.’
Richard had become noticeably cooler. ‘It’s not just important to our prosperity. It’s indispensable.’
Harry nodded. ‘So people keep telling me, and I guess I believe them, though countries have broken away from other countries before, haven’t they, and ended up doing all right? I mean, I imagine the American Revolution didn’t make economic sense at the time, given that Britain was probably America’s number-one trading partner?’
Richard didn’t respond to this and was now looking towards the bar, rather than at Harry’s face. ‘Speaking of Am
erica,’ he said, ‘can you believe the shit that’s going on over there?’ And he began talking about the presidential election in which the loutish and wilfully ignorant Trump was doing unexpectedly well.
But Harry was only half-listening. He was thinking about Michelle. He was thinking that, while he didn’t like what she’d said about the Polish builders, it wasn’t really any more offensive than what Richard had just said about people like her.
‘The Right’s on the march all over the place,’ Richard was saying when Harry started paying attention to him again. ‘People on the Left like us need to get our act together and, however well-meaning, we need to stop making excuses for the—’
‘We’re the Left, are we?’ Harry interrupted.
Richard frowned. ‘Of course. Let’s not beat around the bush. Never mind political theology. Never mind Marxist fairy tales. There’s no time for that nonsense any more. We Remainers are the Left now, period. We’re the good guys. The Brexiteers and the Trumpers are the Right.’
‘Okay,’ Harry said. ‘It’s just that you’re a millionaire, from what I gather, and you work with banks and insurance companies in the City. And me, well, I’m not a millionaire obviously, but I earn a fairly comfortable living helping well-to-do people with lovely houses make their houses even lovelier.’
Two Tribes Page 7