She came right to the front of the little stage, and looked out at them, arms still crossed. They gave catcalls of admiration.
‘But how about your civilization?’ she asked them. ‘How about your culture?’
There were more hoots of derision. ‘Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous, you lot having a culture.’ She looked at them sideways, scrunching her face up in an expression of incredulity. ‘I mean, just look at you!’ More hoots. More laughter. Tiffany laughed with them.
‘But seriously, lads, your culture . . . what would it look like if it existed? I mean, I know you’re a bunch of savages, but you do have things you believe in, don’t you? Give yourself some credit. You’ve got a sense of right and wrong, haven’t you? You’ve got a sense of honour. You’ve got people you care about and things that make you feel that life is good. It’s just that your things are different from theirs. So really and truly, all kidding aside, what would your society be like if it wasn’t for them? What do you think it would look like?’
They looked up at her blankly, unsure of what she meant and uncertain how to respond to her now that she was no longer either teasing them or flirting with them.
She smiled at them. ‘Well, I don’t know, of course – it’s really not my call – but if you want my opinion I reckon it would be a bit like the kingdoms of the Angles all those centuries ago, when they first settled here, and before their leaders got too comfortable. Small communities, tight-knit groups, and men raised to be fighters in a tough world where you needed tough men to protect the tribe against its enemies. Tell me I’m wrong if you like, but I think that’s your natural habitat. Am I right?’
The men cheered noisily, though perhaps more out of general good feeling than as an indication that they agreed in detail with her analysis. She nodded and smiled.
‘Human rights, parliament, art galleries, universities, Enlightenment values . . . all that stuff has got nothing to do with you, has it? In fact, I bet a lot of you haven’t even heard of that last one. But you’ve got a culture. Seriously, all kidding aside, you’ve got a strong culture. It just isn’t about things like that. It’s about being part of a tribe, and being loyal to it, and being willing to fight and die for it if necessary against anyone who tries to push it around. It’s like the culture of sport in a way. In fact, I reckon that’s why we love sport so much, because it lets us get back to those old simple values. It feels good to support your own team, doesn’t it? To stick up for your lot against the others, no matter what, for no particular reason except that it’s yours. And there’s nothing to beat that feeling, is there, when your side scores that winning goal. It’s shit for the other side, of course, but who cares? That’s their problem, isn’t it? They should have been better, shouldn’t they? Or they should have fought harder. Either way, it’s not your concern. It’s not your concern at all.’
She stood with her hands on her hips, right at the front of the stage, looking down at them affectionately. ‘I reckon what your culture’s all about is courage and loyalty. And, most of all, I reckon it’s about belonging. And I’ll tell you what: I bloody love that about you. I wouldn’t change it for the world.’
They didn’t react at once. They were still taking on board the change of gear from being teased affectionately to being asked what really mattered to them.
‘What do you reckon, boys?’ She’d turned slightly sideways again. She had that masculine habit of constantly shifting around, planting and replanting herself on the wood beneath her, as if readying herself for some physical challenge. ‘Belonging. Isn’t that it? It’s a tough world out there, and it’s getting tougher. The people who’ve been running things don’t get that yet. Their lives are still easy. They’ve noticed that the world has changed, and it bothers them, but they still imagine that they can change it back. But you know better, don’t you? You know the world has changed for good. You may not know it with your heads, perhaps – men like you don’t think with your heads about stuff like this – but you know it deep down in your guts. There’s danger ahead, there are threats, and you’re getting yourselves ready to fight for your own.’
TWENTY-FOUR
‘Can I get you anything while you’re waiting?’ asked the young waiter.
Lucy shook her head. ‘Thanks but I’ll wait till my friend gets here. She was at King’s Cross forty minutes ago so she must be close.’
‘I think there’s been some sort of problem on the Tube,’ the waiter said. ‘One of the other customers mentioned it.’
‘Really? Oh crap.’
She picked up her phone, pushing her thick red hair out of the way as she searched for London transport updates. Around her young couples, about half of them Chinese, sat at the single row of tables that were laid out along the wall of a tiny, corridor-like Soho restaurant. It was all very functional. White tablecloths. White strip light. Linoleum floor. No decorations of any kind, other than the calendar behind the counter with a picture of Tiananmen Square. Lucy liked that. It felt authentic, like the food they served here, fiercely hot and brutally carnivorous.
‘Lucy darling! So sorry to keep you!’
Her friend had made it. They hugged and kissed. They’d met at school, a progressive independent school near Hampstead Heath, and though they disagreed about almost everything, their friendship had endured. There was a certain energy that each of them recognized in the other. ‘Lovely to see you, Tiffany. It’s been way too long.’
Tiffany settled into her seat and picked up the menu, chewing at her lower lip for a moment as she briefly surveyed the options, and then looking up again at Lucy with her bright lively eyes. ‘I’ve been up at my great-uncle’s place in Norfolk. The whole journey was absolutely fine until I hit London, and then there was a signal failure or something on the Northern Line. Typical, isn’t it? An eighty-mile journey, and the last three miles lets you down. Anyway, what do you recommend? I’m absolutely fucking starving!’
Lucy signalled to the waiter, miming the act of drinking from a bottle. ‘The dandan noodles are pretty amazing, but let’s get some beers sorted first. Now listen, Tiffany. It’s really great to see you, but let’s decide while we’re still sober what kind of evening we’re going to have. Get thoroughly hammered and have a screaming row about Brexit? Or just get thoroughly hammered?’
The woman at the table behind Lucy twisted round in her seat to get a look at Tiffany, who her companion had recognized from the TV. Tiffany wiggled her eyebrows at her. The woman looked quickly away.
‘Hmmm, tough choice,’ Tiffany said. ‘Tough choice. They’re both pretty tempting.’
The waiter came over with two half-litre bottles of ice-cold Chinese beer.
‘I think I’m probably going to need the screaming row, to be honest,’ Tiffany decided as they clinked the bottles together. ‘But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not really about Brexit between you and me. It’s not even to do with all the other nonsense we used to argue about, Labour versus Tories, Left versus Right. I was thinking about this on the train. We’re so alike at one level. We’ve both read our Nietzsche, we both believe that only excellence redeems the world. It’s just that we have different ideas about what excellence actually is. Your people were lawyers and mathematicians and you see excellence as intellectual brilliance. My people were soldiers and adventurers, and I see it as charisma and strength. Maybe we should scream at each other about that?’
‘So you’re still peddling that crypto-fascist mystico-chivalric cultural Viagra?’
Tiffany laughed. ‘Later, Lucy, later. We’ve got news to catch up on first, and some serious drinking to do. Crypto-fascist chivalric Viagra is very good, but keep it for a few hours’ time.’
TWENTY-FIVE
‘So now two of your made-up characters meet in a restaurant and have a conversation?’ Cally says. ‘It’s a funny kind of history book you’re writing.’
We’re on another of our hikes across London. A hot sticky blanket of cloud is pressing down on the city, and we’re walkin
g along a busy street south of the river, avoiding hawkers and beggars, weaving round pavement stalls where people shout out their wares and roadside preachers peddle their sundry syncretic religions.
‘Lucy’s not made up at all,’ I tell her. ‘She really was Richard’s daughter and she really was a lecturer at LSE. And we know from Harry’s diary that her dad and step-mum were setting up a discussion group. Okay, I don’t know whether Lucy really did come along to it as a guest speaker, but you have to admit it’s more than possible. And the views she expressed there really are hers. I got them from her tweets and blog posts, and the tweets and blog posts of her friends.’
‘And she really used the phrase “Guiding Body”?’
‘I’ve got no evidence that she used those actual words back then in 2017, but it doesn’t seem so unlikely. The idea was already in the air. And it’s not just Lucy. You can find lots of instances of that kind of argument in the Twitter archive of the period. And Lucy certainly uses the expression later on in her life. She wrote a book – Toward Epistocracy – and “Guiding Body” appears there many times.’
‘And Tiffany?’
‘I’ve taken more liberties there, I admit. Lucy did have a sports journalist friend by that name who went to school with her and was, as far as I can tell, the only friend of hers to be on the opposite side of the Brexit argument. I’ve studied Tiffany’s social media presence in the archive and think I’ve been true to the way she looked and talked and her general attitude to life, but I don’t really have any evidence she was involved in giving speeches like that.’
‘Speeches to a non-existent prototype of the Patriotic League, at the country seat of her non-existent great-uncle. I should imagine not!’
I shrug. ‘I’ve sort of mythologized her, I suppose; made her the embodiment of a force or an idea. You know? Like a Greek deity.’
Cally brushes flies off her face. ‘So what would she be the goddess of? Martial Virtue? Ethno-Nationalism? This is some weird book you’re writing, Zoe. You need to be careful. You really do.’
I laugh. ‘But you’re always telling me I’m too careful!’
We trudge on. I’m actually rather pleased that she’s worried for me, because I suspect that my cautiousness is one of the main reasons that she isn’t attracted to me in the way I want her to be. She’s drawn to more flamboyant types.
‘Seriously, Zoe,’ she says, ‘they won’t like what you’re doing. There’s an agreed version of history and that’s what we’re paid to write.’
We’re headed towards the Vauxhall Camp, which stands on the site of Richard and Karina’s riverside apartment, and also happens to be the location of one of the last major battles of the Warring Factions period. We’re walking through streets that I suppose are the modern equivalent of those long commercial roads that Harry described as lacing through the whole of London. Back then this city was one of the wealthiest in the world, a global financial centre, the capital of a country rich enough to import half of its food. But after that came the period during which every window in these streets would have been smashed, and many of the buildings reduced to piles of rubble over which the militias fought with guns and rocket launchers while drone-bombs buzzed overhead like lethal wasps. The Catastrophe was well underway by this point, hundreds of millions of people across the world were fleeing floods and fire, and, if there was a time when it would have been a good idea to set aside differences in order to focus on the really important things, that would certainly have been it. But no. Those guys blasted away at each other as if nobody and nothing mattered but them and their quarrel.
But the fighting did eventually end and life returned to the streets, a bit like a forest regenerating after a fire, even if in a much more stunted form. Rubble was cleared, buildings were patched up and replaced, and back came Harry’s practical people, the kind who concentrated on making a living and relied on tradition to deal with the bigger picture. Temples and shrines of sundry gods and saints were re-established along with the shops, to help them feel at home.
It’s very different from Harry’s day, of course. There would have been a constant procession of cars back then, while now there are almost no mechanized vehicles at all except for police carts, and, when darkness falls what lights there are will be dim and functional, and nothing like the blaze of colour that Harry describes, gleaming on the wet pavement, and on the road, and on the spray thrown up by the wheels of cars. Here and there small, ramshackle wind turbines turn above the roofs to help charge up the batteries that some storekeepers like to use when the mains supply cuts out. (Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Clink-clank, clink-clank. Each one has its own rhythm.) And the shops are of a different kind as well. There are tailors sewing shirts; workshops where they beat old metal into new utensils; small, specialist markets where traders sit behind rows of tables, buying and selling stale bread or rags or metal or bones. We even pass a place that buys dog faeces, which I’ve heard they use for tanning leather. But in spite of all these differences, the world as Harry would have seen it is still visible. Many of the buildings date back to the twentieth or nineteenth centuries – that row of shops there, this church tower pocked by bullets – and the layout of the roads is virtually unchanged, even if their formerly metalled surfaces are barely maintained at all.
But then we round a corner and the connection between then and now abruptly ends. There’s no trace in front of us of the London that Harry lived in. There are no towers, no buildings of any substance at all for two or three kilometres, just a wire fence, two metres high, punctuated every fifty yards or so by an open gate, and beyond it a vast shanty-town, smoking and steaming in the heat, a city within a city of improvised shacks constructed from cardboard and salvaged pieces of wood and plastic and iron. It’s a place where even the fossilized imprint of the past has been systematically pounded into dust, and all that remains is the future. There is a stench of sewage and rotting food waste. And three birds watch us, spaced out along the fence: a parrot, a seagull and a crow.
The Warring Factions is Cally’s period. She’s brought her screen with her and we work out exactly where the apartment block would have stood where Richard and Karina lived with their son Greg. There’s a metalled road round the outside of the fence, built for the convenience of the security forces in the event of civil disorder and, rather than going through the camp, we follow this road to the river, and then along the top of the concrete flood barrier until we reach the right spot. The apartment block isn’t even visible as a ruin, its remains broken up to make the platform on which the camp is built. There are just shanties there now, and a gate through the fence that leads to a jetty where boats come to pick up workers and take them to the flood works and the paddy fields.
People stream around us on foot and on bicycles, many of them craning their necks to look at us, as Cally shows me pictures on her screen. First we look at the glass towers as they once were, and then at what they became during the conflict when their windows and their plaster and their furnishings had all been blasted away and the apartments were just bare strata in concrete cliffs, in some cases collapsed or sheared sideways as if by some geological force, with Patriot soldiers perched here and there on their precarious ledges.
Why was the fighting so fierce in this particular spot? Some people say that it was the presence near here of the headquarters of a powerful security service, but Cally insists that this is an irrelevance and that the reasons were entirely to do with the contingencies of the battle. She says it’s like the games of chess that she and I sometimes play. At certain points, everything seems to converge on a particular square, though that same square, at other stages of the game, or in other games, has no special significance at all.
The original inhabitants had long since fled. The Patriot militias had made the towers a vantage point from which to fire rockets and mortar shells across the river and at the surrounding city. The Liberal forces – the so-called Progressive Alliance – flung lead and explosives at them. But the Li
berals knew the Patriotic League had prevailed in most of the rest of the country and that Patriot soldiers were already moving towards them from the north to relieve their comrades in the towers. By now, almost all of the other factions had been either defeated by or subsumed into these two. Only the Democrats, who wanted to settle the whole conflict by a free election, still clung on by their fingertips in a few redoubts. But they were a spent force and had been for a long time. Universal suffrage, as we all now know, was a wonderfully generous idea but only really worked in a time of such exceptional bounty that even the poor could be persuaded to give their support voluntarily to sensible leaders. And there was no particular class or segment of the population that saw the Democrats as their own. So it was just the Patriots and the Liberals slogging it out.
A woman comes to the door of one of the shacks next to the gate, right where Karina and Richard’s apartment block would have been. She has Afro-European features like my own, but is much thinner and smaller than I am, with the skull showing through the taut yellow skin of her face. She eyes us anxiously as she empties a bucketful of dirty water into the ditch that leads from the camp into one of the culverts along the riverside track. Five or six parrots immediately arrive to investigate the refuse, screeching and squawking excitedly.
I smile at the woman reassuringly. She tightens her lips slightly in minimal acknowledgement of my attempt at friendliness, but doesn’t smile back. A small girl of perhaps two or three comes out to look at us, wearing only a grubby T-shirt. Still holding her empty bucket, the mother shoos her back inside with another anxious glance in our direction. She wipes the sweat off her forehead. She looks around for something else to get on with. The neighbour on the opposite side of the ditch calls something out to her and she answers. She glances back at us again. The stench of raw sewage is almost overpowering.
Two Tribes Page 20