Eminent Domain
Page 1
Published by Repeater Books
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11 Shepperton House
89-93 Shepperton Road
London
N1 3DF
United Kingdom
www.repeaterbooks.com
A Repeater Books paperback original 2020
1
Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Carl Neville 2020
Carl Neville asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN: 9781912248834
Ebook ISBN: 9781912248841
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd
To Ayako, who waited for me.
To Sookie, who made me wait for her.
Contents
1
Jonathan Barrow
Rose Galloway
Barrow
Rose
Barrow
Lewis
Barrow
Profile CS 97-04-23 “Lewis”
Barrow
Conference Room 32. Katja/Tereza
Rose
Katja/Tereza
Katja
Lewis 09/04/2018 01:32
09/04/18 08:15
Barrow
Tereza
Katja/Barrow
A Poem from the PRB “Pachamummer”
2
Julia Verona 16/3/2018
Julia’s Dream
A Guide to Your Guest ROD/FAQ
Katja: 09/04/2018 11:07
Barrow
Rose
Lewis
Barrow
Lewis
Julia/The Circuit/South London
Julia
Rose
An Interview with Robert Gillespie: Extract 1
Barrow
The Team
Tereza
Katja
Tereza
Rose
Barrow
Julia
Two Poems from the PRB
3
Tom Burridge
A Conversation About Democracy
A Conversation about Resolution Way
Barrow
Rose
Barrow
The Dead
An Interview with Robert Gillespie: Extract 2
Katja
Barrow/Tom
Katja
Tom/Barrow
Katja
Barrow/Tom
Barrow/Squires
Katja
Lewis
Barrow
Lewis
Tom
Lewis
Rose
Barrow/Tom
Rose
Tom
Rose
Lewis
Barrow 12/04/2018 18:37
Lewis
Barrow
4
Franklin
Los Elijidos: Rebaja Beach
Franklin 12/04/2018
Tereza
Lewis
Katja
Tereza
Katja/Lewis
Katja
Barrow
Katja
Barrow
Lewis
Franklin
Katja
Rose
Tereza
Rose
Barrow/Abhishek
Barrow
5
Waterston 07/04/2018
The Meeting 04/04/2018
Waterston
The Meeting 04/04/2018
Dead Words
Waterston/Squires
Katja
Julia
Katja
Waterston
Rose
Waterston
Tereza
Barrow
Tereza
Lewis
Franklin
Lewis
Barrow
Julia
Lewis
Katja
6
Dominic Bewes
Lewis 14/04 7:30
Katja
Franklin
Julia
Rose
Lewis
Julia
Rose
Julia
Franklin
Dominic
Waterston
Lewis
Franklin
Waterston
Tereza
Dominic
Waterston
Waterston
Dominic
Rose’s Dream
Barrow
An Interview with Robert Gillespie: Part 3
Rose
Barrow
1
Alan Bewes left his office at five on the dot and headed for the station. It was a mild spring evening full of warm eddies and crosscurrents that made him feel as intoxicated by the sense of change and new beginnings as he had been as a boy.
He took a deep breath on what had once been called Charing Cross Road. How time flies, and yet what a monumental thing they had all lived through. Now he would retire, spend a relaxing summer with his family watching the Games he had been instrumental in organizing.
He was an old man, suddenly, to his own surprise, and still thought in terms of “nations”, perhaps in a way that younger generations simply did not. He imagined somehow, whimsical still at his age, that the breeze that came swelling up the road was all of Old Europe and beyond that the Old USSR and the People’s Republics of United Africa and the Middle East, The Great Seventy Percent of the Earth’s Surface, the billions gathered together in Universal Association, breathing freely as one.
The underground station at Central Interchange was piping out a piece specifically composed for the Games by Stanhope. Personally, he liked it, though it had inevitably been attacked for containing nostalgic, sentimental and even kitsch elements, and there had been the usual complaints about the Cult of the Individual Composer. As he waited for the train to Birmingham he shared a cup of tea with a young citizen who recognized him from the news and struck up conversation, asking about the progress of the Games and explaining that she had helped to work on developing part of the material used in the moulding of the great resin shell that formed the stadium. He expressed his admiration for her work on the project and wonder at the technology that had allowed them to create so large a building as a single, seamless, biodegradable whole. In his youth such things had seemed impossible dreams, as had many things that had now come to pass. He asked about the music. Did she feel it was too British? She responded that it was perhaps impossible to fully and absolutely remove all historical influences from the culture, at least at this stage, a mere twenty years into the People’s Republic.
She smiled a forgiving, affectionate smile. You have your attachments, she seemed to say, at your age one becomes nostalgic, we understand.
He grew a little rueful on the train to Birmingham, thinking of the past, the future of SSF1, the troubles ahead with the recent vote, the internal investigations, but he had learned to focus on immediate tasks and take pleasure in their completion, and besides now it would all be someone else’s concern and he would have the years that were left to him with Jennifer, with Dominic, wou
ld travel a little more, somewhere warm, a return visit to Africa perhaps.
Back at the house in Handsworth he found they were playing host to a delightful girl from the United States. He enjoyed a good-natured discussion on the ongoing struggles there, reviewed the preparations for the opening musical sequence from the Games and received an impromptu visit from Squires and Solchenko, pressuring him to talk about departmental matters, a pressure he politely evaded. He drank a dry sherry in a toast proposed to the success of the Games, grew sleepy, retired to bed at 10:30pm and passed away peacefully in his sleep at exactly 3:14am, in his own bed, in his own home, in the country, among the people he had built his life around; his beloved grandson in the room next to him, his wife of forty-seven years sleeping softly beside him in a world transformed beyond all recognition from the one he had been born into.
The Clarion
07/04/2018
Obituaries
Alan Bewes: An exceptional thinker and strategist who rose from humble origins to become instrumental in the intellectual and political life of the twentieth century.
Alan Robert Bewes, who has died at the age of eighty-two, was one of the most distinguished public servants of his generation.
Born in Leigh, Lancashire in 1936, Bewes was instrumental in providing the intellectual framework for the six Great Institutions of the post-war period when still in his early twenties with the influential paper “From Unions to Commons”. Bewes’s far-sighted argument, in conjunction with other members of the influential pan-European CCC (Cybernetic Commons Committee) drew on the Hungarian Document in broadly anticipating the necessary direction of both post-war social democracy and the communist planned economy over the next forty or so years. They sought to both influence policy and build parallel institutions, drawing on the concepts of “forced integration” and “spatiality” developed by Ghanaian economist Kwame Bediako. With the Soviet Thaw the CCC was instrumental in helping to expand and integrate the burgeoning Electronic Communication Infrastructure in the Soviet sphere in conjunction with COMECON and the Nordic Belt Initiative.
Bewes was repeatedly detained by both state and private militia during the period popularly referred to as the Autarchy, from the financial crisis of 1976 to the trans-European workers accords that established parallel power, integrating unions and institutions all across Europe following the victories of radical socialist governments in Italy (’73) Sweden (’75) Norway (’76) France (’80) and the absorption of a unified Germany into the reformed Soviet sphere. From the 1980s onward Bewes took on an SSF1 role. During the Final Expulsions of the mid-1990s he helped to arrange safe passage to the United States for the remnants of the landowning class.
Bewes was a passionate lover of traditional European folk music and was often to be seen in his later years in the Canteens of London, where he maintained an office, as well as in Birmingham, where he lived. There will be a memorial service at the Public Hall, Capital Street, Birmingham on Sunday, 26th April, open to all.
He is survived by his partner Jennifer Bewes.
PRB 7654890
Jonathan Barrow
When the message came through from Waterson, Barrow was sitting in the kitchen reading the Saturday edition of the Clarion. He found he had maintained a stubborn fondness for the printed word, ink on paper, its perishability, the folding and manipulating it required. Such attachments were considered a little reactionary in some quarters, this hankering after physical things. It was a short, slippery slope from a print edition of the daily newspaper instead of the ephemeral, democratic news feed on one’s ROD, to the fetishizing of possessions and from there to private property of all kinds. Well, paper was, he told himself, his only remaining vice. He drank his decaffeinated tea, freshly brewed, quite delicious.
He looked up from the paper to the silent television to see that Bewes had died, images of him as young man and at various stages of his life fading into each other. His name and the dates at the bottom of the screen, footage of him holding forth at one of the great strikes and occupations of the 1970s, probably Aberdeen.
Another one gone, and he had just been reading all their reflections on the twentieth anniversary of the Breach. His ROD beeped. For a moment, he struggled to remember his decryption code. How quickly one forgets. Waterson was asking him to come in to Central ASAP. He was faintly surprised Waterson was still alive, let alone working on a Saturday and feeling the need to haul in the unofficially retired. What were the implications of that?
Rose came in from the garden where she had been sipping tea and smoking, singing distractedly along to a tape of old folk music she had been trying to get him to appreciate, and stood in the kitchen doorway in her Japanese robe and full makeup. She was framed by the intricately plucked guitar, the ivy coiling in from the trellis beside the door, appraising him with her sharp green eyes.
Enjoying the music? she asked.
I’m still trying, he said.
Old songs that an old lover made for me. Crane.
He nodded.
Songs from a different world. Another country. All about the pursuit of a woman by a man. Pursuit, transformation, magic, murder. Themes I thought might appeal to you, Barrow.
What’s brought this on?
Oh, she said, pursed her lips, the talk I am giving next week, enquiries from abroad about Crane, Safety being revived. Anniversaries everywhere to be reckoned with.
Well, he said, folding the newspaper. The old world is rapidly passing away. Alan Bewes has died.
Reading the obituaries again? I should have thought you’d have had enough of, she paused then went on with a faint smile, death, in your line of work. I have a rare review in there if you can tear yourself away from their morbid embrace.
No, he said, gestured to the television, a message from SSF, calling me in. They both paused for a moment, something going unsaid, then he grabbed her as she came past, heading for the coffee machine for a refill, and put his arms around her, kissed her forehead. Old lovers indeed, she has said it to provoke him, whet his appetite, he knows. Crane. He will wipe them from her memory, from his own.
How’s this for a morbid embrace? he asked. A rare pun, then, Rosie, he said. She ran her hands up his back under his jacket. She was slightly taller than he was, though he was above average at five feet ten. He liked that, her size, her confidence, her sheer intellectual power, her cruel wit.
She responded to his kiss, leaning into him. Her mouth smelled of smoke, her lips red as blood and bitter with black Russian cigarettes. The perspiration across her top lip, the calluses on her palms and her blunt nails. A sudden thudding of blood against the back of his eyes. He found her tongue was in his mouth, his fly undone, her dressing gown tugged open.
Rose Galloway
Saturday morning, her back and thighs sore, the bed still damp from the night before. Barrow is up already, being a considerate partner, making breakfast. She imagines him in the kitchen trying hard to find some delicacy, cups and saucers snapping in his hands, bear-like, brooding, a man who has no idea how to handle anything gently. She blows smoke into the air, watches it drift, blue nimbus, grey central grain, a bruise against the day, coughs, feels the half pleasurable shift and crackle of the mucus webbing her lungs.
She reaches for her Passocon to play something through the downstairs speakers. Music drifts up through the house. “Two Magicians”. Crane had liked that song. She pauses for a second, listening to the lyrics, barely meaningful anymore:
She looked out of the window as white as any milk
And he looked in at the window as black as any silk
Wrapped in a Kimono she applies makeup in the bathroom mirror, inspects herself, sucks in her cheeks, widens her eyes. There you are, Rose, what’s left of you, your beauty starting to crumble, eroded by the constant friction of the eyes that have swept over you, the pressure of the gaze that has fastened on you; others, your own. She could go to a cosmetic surgeon, buttress, shore it up in a thousand ways, as so many do, but she
prefers in an odd way the ripe edge of it, how the nearness to death brings a different, more burnished and darker luminosity to her eyes, pools in the cracks around them, the tracery of fine lines on her pursed lips.
On the patio, smoking, looking out across the overgrown garden, she realises that she had dreamt of Crane. Erotic dreams of those wild years in the mid-Nineties when the whole of London was ablaze, the enormous demonstrations, the monarchy forced out, the last of the great estates reclaimed and communized. How alive they felt then, how charged. They used to ask, breathless, inflamed: What will we become, after the revolution? Will there be conflict, will there be pride, will the local matter, the family? Will we still be anxious about death, grieve?
Enjoying the music? she asks. Barrow grabs her as she goes past, and still restless and needing relief from her thoughts, she goes with it, up onto the table then down among the broken planes of heat and light cutting in through the French windows.
Barrow’s face all needful toil, her own, she guessed, still angry and gulping.
Will there still be loss?
Barrow
Waterson’s office looks as if it has remained untouched since the Autarchy, the air thick and dusty, yellowing files, a vintage lamp, a burnished teak globe. Espionage. Even for Barrow the word felt antiquated. He sits at the huge, tiered desk and takes out his pen and jotter to make notes.
The legendary SSF1 — how many of them left now? Four, five? Waterston still has seniority. Even ten years ago there were forty or so. Waterson’s nickname, from back in the Seventies, was “the Guarantor”. If anyone knew, he knew. If you wanted to be sure what was misinformation, theory, speculation or fact, if you wanted the bigger picture, there was only one source.
Well, Waterson begins, regarding the recent passing away of Bewes. It has been decided that an investigation is required. We are very short of personpower at this stage and so, exceptional request, we would like you to come back in for a while.
In what capacity?
Consultative. Stepping in to provide support as necessary, if something a little more indelicate, a little more “hands-on” is needed. You have considerable experience with such matters. Experience that many of our younger colleagues lack.
There are security implications?
The emergence of President Connaught onto the world stage, for one thing.