Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  The food, when it arrived, was artfully presented, arranged in the middle of clean white plates in a cross-hatched pattern, almost like abstract paintings, with little streaks of various brightly coloured sauces. (Harry couldn’t help wondering about the complicated relationship between this artfulness and those bare-brick ‘urban’ walls.) I don’t know what they ate, but there was probably meat or fish in both the starter and the main course, because one of the most striking things about life in Britain in the early part of the twenty-first century is just how much flesh everyone gobbled down. Even people on relatively low incomes typically ate meat or fish every day, and not infrequently several times a day, absurd as that seems now. But this was of course a Ponzi-scheme society that was only possible because it was able to defer its inevitable collapse to a point some way off in the future. Harry knew this perfectly well – he sometimes refers to it in his diary – and we know Michelle did, and so no doubt did Letty, but people in those days were somehow able to know and not know this fact simultaneously, just as the two of them doubtless also knew and didn’t know that, even though they weren’t conspicuously wealthy, they were significantly richer than most of their compatriots and so hugely rich in comparison to the majority of people on the planet that there was no way that the material resources of the Earth could support a lifestyle like theirs for anything but a small minority of its more than seven billion human inhabitants.

  Harry asked Letty about her time in Kenya. She told him it was both fascinating and exasperating. ‘Lovely people. Beautiful country. Awful corruption. Lousy politics.’ And she went on to say that, of course, the problem with countries like Kenya is that they were artificial creations. Their boundaries were drawn up for the convenience of colonial powers, and made no sense at all in terms of the pre-existing language groups, cultures and allegiances, so that people had been lumped together who were historically part of completely separate nations, and separated off from their own ethnic kin. The Maasai people, for instance, with whom she and her husband had worked, had their own unique language and culture but were more or less equally divided between two separate states.

  Harry was immediately interested in this. ‘Arbitrary boundaries,’ he writes later. ‘People who had nothing in common being shoved together, people with the same language being split up, as European Empires carved up the African cake without a thought for the preferences of the people who actually lived there. It’s one of those universally accepted truths that members of my particular tribe repeat to one another when the topic of Africa comes up: a dinner party truism that we pass back and forth, like ants passing back and forth the pheromones that bind them together into a single entity.’

  He took a sip of wine. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, leaning forward slightly. ‘What you’ve just said is something I’ve heard and read many, many times. African countries are artificial constructs. They were imposed, not chosen, and this causes conflict and makes nation-building difficult. I know I’ve said it myself more than once and I’ve no reason to think it isn’t true. Yet when our own compatriots express concern about Britain being incorporated in a huge multinational construct of that kind, or when they question whether making our society even more multicultural is necessarily a good thing, we don’t even allow it as a point of view. We say it’s prejudiced nonsense and we call them racists and bigots.’

  Letty’s face changed. She was bewildered and at the same time worried. This was pretty unorthodox stuff. What else was he going to come up with? Had she completely misread what kind of person he was? Was he a racist? Was he going to turn out not to be her sort of person at all?

  ‘I don’t think I follow you,’ she said. ‘What are you saying exactly?’

  ‘I’m rather interested at the moment in where our ideas come from. Us liberal Remainers, us Guardian-reading types, like to imagine ourselves to be the reasonable ones, don’t we? And we like to point out the dishonesty and lack of logic of the other side. And yet we ourselves . . . Well, I’ll give you another example. That bus—’

  She knew immediately what he meant, as anyone at that time with the slightest knowledge of British politics would have done, for the bus was constantly being referred to by the Remainer side as an example of the Leavers’ perfidy. It was a large red bus, and the ‘Leave’ side had painted it with the demonstrably false claim that Britain sent £350 million to the European Union every week, which could otherwise have been spent on the National Health Service.

  ‘You’re not going to defend that, surely?’ Letty exclaimed. She was really troubled now. Everyone she knew, including even her stubbornly Leave-voting father, agreed that the bus was incontrovertible evidence of the deep dishonesty of the politicians who had campaigned for ‘Leave’, and it had become a cornerstone of the Remainer narrative about the unfairness of their defeat. ‘It was deliberately misleading,’ Letty said. ‘We get half that money back as a rebate and most of the rest of it as—’

  ‘Oh, I know it was misleading. Absolutely. But it occurred to me recently that it was equally misleading for people on the Remain side to talk up all the projects that the EU finances in this country.’

  ‘But they do fund projects in this country, Harry. Good God, I should know! I’ve helped all kinds of community projects apply for funding!’

  ‘Of course they do. But if it’s dishonest to say we pay all that money to the EU when in fact most of it returns to us, then surely it’s equally dishonest to say that we benefit from EU funding, when in fact that funding is really our own money coming home?’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said without much conviction. It was obvious she couldn’t see what point he was making. It just seemed to her trivial and nit picking. She looked exasperated, flustered even.

  He smiled, apologized for being contrary and asked her about her son.

  I suppose he was tired by the time he got home. He writes a few pages in his diary, but he doesn’t tell us how he and Letty parted or whether they agreed to meet again, and he doesn’t offer any general thoughts on Letty herself, or what he now feels about her. After describing that conversation about the bus he simply draws a line.

  ‘The thing you feel you’ve lost,’ he writes. ‘The thing you can’t reach. The thing you’re not allowed to reach. It’s always so much more powerful, more intense, more vivid, than things that are actually present.’

  FOURTEEN

  Christmas was a very big thing in England in the early twenty-first century. A former pagan festival overlaid with Christian meanings, it still flourished in those largely irreligious times, complete with a new tongue-in-cheek mythology to take the place of the Christian story. This new narrative, which no adult believed but which was told to small children as if it was true, centred on the cheerful and rotund figure of Santa Claus, who was the owner of a toy factory, and travelled the planet with bulging sacks of consumer goods. It was a kind of cargo cult, a festival of consumption so prodigious that, in countries like Britain, it formed a significant component of the entire national economy, an event whose impact was discussed on the financial pages of newspapers.

  Decorations began to appear as much as two months before the day itself and special Christmas music was played in the shops, referring to a rich, if shallow, iconography of reindeers, snow, warm fires, sleighs, family reunions, seasonal food, Santa and presents, presents, presents. Millions of trees, grown specially for the occasion, were chopped down and installed in people’s homes, to be covered in electric lights and shiny balls and then discarded in the New Year. Millions of turkeys, raised specially for Christmas dinners, were slaughtered. Thousands of tonnes of gifts were imported on container ships from Old China, many of which would never find a place in the life of their recipients, and an appreciable portion of which very soon would be going all the way back to China for disposal, for Britain had already filled up so many landfill sites with discarded goods and packaging, it struggled to find space for more.

  ‘Michelle and Cheryl wish a very Merry Christmas
to all our lovely customers!’ says the greeting on the Facebook page of Shear Perfection. ‘We’re closed now but we’ll be open again as usual 27th– 31st, so come and have a makeover for that New Year’s Eve party, or perhaps that new look to set you up for 2017.’

  Michelle seems to have enjoyed the preparations for Christmas. She writes about trips to supermarkets with her mother and her sister. She speaks of a present-buying outing to Norwich with her niece Jules, and a ‘Shear Perfection girls’ night out’ to a club in Cambridge. When the day itself arrived, Michelle, Kath, Jen and Jules worked all morning at Kath’s house to prepare the feast and set out the room it would be eaten in. In her family, at least, this seems to have been strictly a woman’s task.

  Trevor was the first to arrive along with his new girlfriend, Sandra. Then Jen’s husband came with two out of their three grownup sons. Jen’s oldest son was accompanied by his wife and two small children, the children clutching toys that they’d unwrapped at home earlier that morning: a large blue plastic truck that could be remotely controlled and a doll that could say more than twenty different things.

  Everyone made themselves at home in the Christmas setting which Michelle and the other three women had arranged for them. Pongo slept in the hallway. Jules fetched drinks. Michelle played with the children. Jen and Kath put the vegetables in serving dishes and mixed up gravy and white sauce from packets. Later, after the meal, Cheryl would call by with her partner and her two children, and, as everyone became drunker, family members who weren’t present would make video calls to the whole group. Many photographs were taken on phones, and some of them can still be found on the Facebook archive. There’s a picture of Michelle pulling a comical face under a sprig of mistletoe while her brother-in-law Ken kisses her on the cheek. There’s a family group taken by Michelle herself, Jules at one end looking like a younger version of Michelle, arm-inarm with her cousin, Jen’s youngest son. Michelle’s mother Kath is in the middle, for nominally she’s the matriarch, but she’s very small and fragile and slightly dazed-looking, so the figure that draws the eye is big, red-faced fifty-year-old Trevor, who stands grinning beside her with an arm round her shoulders, wearing a pair of fairy wings and waving a wand. ‘Couldn’t fit our Christmas fairy on the tree’ is Michelle’s caption.

  At one point Michelle took Pongo out for a walk in the nearby streets, which were always quiet but were now almost completely deserted. Many of the houses had twinkling lights outside them, or signs that read ‘Merry Christmas’, or electric snowmen and reindeers that blinked on and off. (There was no real snow. Even back then, snow fell only rarely in that part of England.) She looked through windows at other families in the yellowish glow of electric lights, eating, drinking and watching TV. In some of them the curtains were already drawn, and the TV light flickered round their edges.

  When she came back in again, the children were playing in the hallway with their new toys, and all of the adults apart from Kath were slumped in the overheated living room in front of an old war movie they’d all seen many times before, which had just got past the opening credits. Kath was bringing in a tray of tea and chocolate biscuits, with a crumpled paper hat still on her head.

  Michelle couldn’t bring herself to surrender to that stupor. She knew it wouldn’t feel like contentment and that it would at best be numbness, a profound boredom that was endurable only because there was no will left to do anything else, a kind of warmed-up death.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she said, ‘we’re not watching this again!’ And, in spite of protests from Trevor and her brother-in-law Ken, she flipped off the TV and organized a game of charades. (Facebook photos: Michelle pretending to be a cat of some kind, holding up her claws; Jen looking very embarrassed and uncomfortable and not obviously looking like anything at all; Trevor standing on one leg in a parody of a ballet dancer; Michelle draining back a very large glass of red wine . . . ) After that it was time for Michelle, Kath, Jen and Jules to start laying out the next meal.

  She drank far too much that evening, and staggered back to her own house arm in arm with Jules, who made her a cup of tea, fed the dog, helped her up the stairs, and then went to bed herself in the spare room.

  FIFTEEN

  Both of Harry’s parents were dead – his mother had died a long time ago, in fact, when he and Ellie were in their early twenties – so his only real family now consisted of Ellie, Phil and their two teenage sons, Josh and Nathan. As it happened, Richard and Karina had decided to spend Christmas in Australia (‘We needed a break from the Brexit madness’) and had invited Ellie and Phil to make use of their house in Suffolk over the holiday period. Harry went to join them there.

  By Harry’s account, this wasn’t an entirely successful plan. Nathan and Josh, who were sixteen and fourteen, were resentful about being separated from their friends in London and were soon ostentatiously bored, withdrawing into their phones in front of the TV. Phil had always found teenage behaviour very difficult and had a savage row with Nathan in the afternoon of Christmas Day, creating a dark cloud of resentment that was still hanging over the family on what was called Boxing Day.

  ‘I feel like throttling Phil when he’s like this,’ Ellie confided to Harry. ‘Would you mind taking him to the pub or something?’

  It was a mild, sunny afternoon. Harry and Phil walked three miles through fields and what Harry calls ‘a mysterious, mushroomysmelling, marshy wood, full of shadow and light’, to the nearest village. It was very much a middle-class pub, Harry records, its decor of bare stripped wood a variant of the stripped-down ‘industrial’ look he’d observed in London.

  On the way over Phil had talked about how hard he found it to cope with his sons’ behaviour, and how he sometimes found himself hating ‘the self-centred little bastards and their sense of entitlement to bloody everything’. But the walk had calmed him and by the time they reached the pub he was ready to move on to other things. They ordered beef sandwiches and beer, and talked about football, Phil plunging into this reassuringly safe topic with obvious relish and relief.

  ‘Burnley are whining that Sissoko didn’t get sent off after that high tackle because he went on to set up that second goal for us. But just look at the video, for Christ’s sake! There was no way that was a red-card offence. A yellow card was exactly right.’

  They spent a good fifteen minutes on football but in the end they couldn’t avoid coming back to Brexit, and to what was happening in America.

  ‘A lot of people just can’t cope with change,’ Phil said. ‘That’s what Trump was playing on. He peddled the illusion that the world could somehow be wound back to how it once was in the good old days. And of course that’s exactly what the Leave voters want as well: to stop the world, to stop history.’

  ‘But isn’t it us who are getting upset about change right now?’ Harry said. ‘We are the Remainers, after all. We’re the ones who are complaining about things not being “normal”. We’re the ones saying, “This doesn’t feel like my country any more.”’

  This doesn’t feel like my country any more. Harry remembered a tedious old man on a coach journey many years ago who’d said those words, after a very long and bitter story in a dreary Midlands voice about how the street he’d lived in all his life had once been full of people like himself but now, except for him and his wife, was entirely populated by Bangladeshis. But Phil was so mellowed by beer and by the arrival of their beef sandwiches that he just grunted and let Harry’s point rest. In fact, the sandwiches were so delicious that even Harry, who never talks about food, pauses to comment on them in his diary. For several minutes they munched in contented silence.

  ‘There are all kinds of funny inversions and contradictions these days,’ Harry finally said when the sandwiches were gone and had been washed down. ‘Like, for instance, we liberal types still don’t forgive Mrs Thatcher for destroying coal-mining communities in the eighties but when Trump says he wants to help the coal industry in Kentucky we all groan.’

  ‘Oh,
come on, Harry. Coal is a relic of the past. Everyone knows that. In fact, that’s a perfect example of what I was talking about. Trump was cynically getting votes by pretending that an obsolete industry could be protected indefinitely.’

  ‘Okay, but “You can’t protect an obsolete industry against the modern world” is pretty much exactly what Thatcher said, wasn’t it? No doubt Kentucky once had tight-knit coal-mining communities too. I read somewhere that the state already has one of the worst opiate problems in America. Yet we’re not really interested. Our sympathies have moved elsewhere. Who we care about and who we don’t seems to largely depend on who we currently need to feel morally superior to. And, let’s face it, working-class people are so last century. If anything they’ve become the bad guys.’

  ‘Well, some of them really are the bad guys. The Leave vote was highest among white working-class voters. Based in large part, one suspects, on a racist preoccupation with immigration.’

  ‘But that’s another thing, Phil. We’re so dishonest with ourselves. Immigration is a case in point. We tell ourselves a fairy story in which a virtuous us wholeheartedly welcomes it, and a wicked them is wholly opposed, but—’

  ‘They’re abusing foreigners in the streets right now, Harry.’

  ‘Who is “they”?’

  ‘Okay, it’s a small minority, obviously, but—’

  ‘Most people think it’s necessary to control immigration, Phil. And that includes members of immigrant communities, and it includes me, and it almost certainly includes you as well. I can’t believe there are really many folk who would honestly want a completely open border.’

  ‘Why not? That’s exactly how it should be, isn’t it?’