Shift

by Mia Gallagher

  He had a brother, she says. Thinking of the Ireland jersey.

  His brother, they say. Eyes widen around the teasteam and fagsmoke.

  Yeah?

  Ah. He’s huge. Bigger than the Bear. And way madder.

  Four years on, only the other day: a loping shape. Scraggy trackie bottoms, flapping hands. Wide shoulders. Too tall. Too skinny. Face a bit fucked, in a way that’s the same but different. In that moment, she knows.

  Pinning Tail on Donkey

  Tempus fugit, as one of the dead languages once put it.

  It’s long ago, yes. Yet I still see no, not me, me? her, as if it were yesterday, standing at the window of our beautiful school, gazing out, as if, yes, imagining.

  We had been in this country, when it was still a country, for three years. By we, I mean me and my family. Yes, I’m originally from an Other Part, though I won’t say where. You’d never believe me, little one, and don’t try figuring it out yourself, you’ll never guess. I’ve gathered too much, ah, hold off, no, moss since, and the world has changed so much: Here and There, those hemispheres of privilege, flipping like the planet’s magnetic field along blessed capital’s fickle axis. Besides, the details of how and why and where and all the befores that led to me being Here – the backstory, as the adverttainment wing of our once great technocracy would have put it – are not important.

  What matters is that we arrived in this country while it was still easing out of troubled nationstatedom, in an early phase of that great investment opportunity known as the Fossilfuel&Water War, during a minor bubble in the period your great-grandparents’ generation called the Boom. As if such a thing was the Big Bang, the genesis of the econosphere, not merely a hiccup in the sacred sink and swell of endless accumulation.

  We were a large family. Three above, three below, me in the middle. A right horde. It was a miracle, my mother often said, that the barriers to entry had lifted for us, particularly at such a sensitive time. A gullible word: miracle. The only miracle was my father, rest his labouring soul. He was a very technikal man, always tinkering away on the intercloud, inventing new apps and such, and, before our rapid exit from the Other Parts, he had accumulated enough know-ware to be able to broker a decent transition for us. He also had an instinctive understanding of our then-burgeoning technocracy’s corridors of power. What fields to fill, what story to tell, who to tell it to – and, most important, from whom to hide. Thanks to his diligence, we soon found housing in a drab part of the city that used to hub this country. We children were shoe-horned into nearby schools, run by the last generation of the dying nationstate’s once-dominant theocrats: the Priests-n-Nuns. We were segregated by gender: girls went to Nuns, boys to Priests. We weren’t the correct faith for those schools; we didn’t directly belong to any of the major faiths of those fundamentalist times. But my father, we assumed, had filled in the correct fields, told the correct story. Back then, there were allowances, even for hordes, once you knew where to find them.

  My father was an exceptionally skilled communicator. We weren’t Here long before he got talking to an even more correct someone in the authorities and they got talking back and suddenly we were on a List for better housing in a better part of the city. After that it was bish-bash-bosh, as a funnyman once said. Soon we found ourselves on a second List, this time for a better school, to match the better housing and the better part of the city. This school was a right trailblazer. It had initially been co-opted by the first-gen technocracy in the ninetynineties, but the early Board had handled the merger subtly, acquiring the school from a lesser faith instead of the Priests-n-Nuns and branding their new enterprise as ‘multifaith’ so as not to ruffle any feathers. One can blame the early technocrats for many things, global-warming-species-extermination-and-on-and-on, but one can’t ever accuse them of underestimating optics. By the time I and my siblings had got on the List, a new Board was in place, with a far more visible agenda. Its mission vines on the Old Web talked about fostering individualism, cultural exchange, difference, and that grail of early optics misdirection – community. Its ultimate target, it claimed, was the wholeperson cultivation of an entire new generation of corpocitizens, full of know-ware, moral resource and creativity. In a radical move, this cohort would include not only ‘natives’ who had been granted the privilege of servicing the debts of the technocracy via the gift of their birth, but ‘Others’, like me, indentured through the gift of being invited.

  I and my siblings understood little of this at the time. For us, the most important aspect of the whole experience was that, thanks to my father’s opaque ministrations, we would finally be able to go to school together again. No small thing, when one is from an Other Part and easily separated from one’s horde. Packing us all off to the same school would also be convenient for my mother, who by then had little time, having taken on many zero-hour tracts to keep us fed while my father, mercy on his endeavours, was busy talking to the right people about the right things when he wasn’t tinkering with apps on the intercloud.

  For me, however, entrance to the new school was deferred. I did not pass through the gates of that trail-blazing place until a full year after the rest of my siblings. There was no obvious reason for this. I was not the stupidest or the cleverest in my family. At ten years, I was not the oldest, at a sensitive time in my hormonoeducational path. Nor was I the youngest, prone to fear at the prospect of being shunted into a new milieu. I was certain the fault could not possibly have lain in human error on my father’s part. He was too deft to mess up little things like box-ticking or form-filling. So what had gone wrong? I took on the blame. I worried: I was a terrible worrier then, burdened by an overactive Mind’s I, prone to generating a surfeit of that obsolete hormone, magenation. Had I offended somebody? Had I antagonised my own parents without knowing? Was I – oh dreadful thought – born wrong, with too much of the Other Parts still in me to ever become an upstanding corpocitizen? As the months passed, I came to another conclusion. While the forms were being filled in, my parents must have simply forgotten me, just as they had when it was the turn of my eyes to be lasered. Being in the middle, neither too loud nor too quiet, too cheeky nor too docile, I was always easy to pass over. Inconspicuous.

  Like yes, wait, like you, little one.

  The new school – my faith, it was beautiful. How my, hush, yes, our heart aches to remember it. This country was green then, as it was until your grandparents’ time, a single landmass where the deadland archipelago now floats, and the sun did shine – occasionally, anyway – instead of this infernal rain. There were trees; I’m sure you’ve seen them time-to-time on the intercloud on those rare occasions when the gennies get going and you can power up your Glass, and there were the other type of cloud too, geophysical ones, white and puffy, in blue sky, and animals; even in the cities, like the one which once hubbed this country, were animals. The new school had no animals, but it did have flowers and grass and, yes, trees. Chemmites had already begun eating away at them, but the destruction wasn’t yet visible. Willows and hawthorns lined the lane that led to the front gate, and behind the seniors’ building grew magnificent Spanish chestnuts, like a row of sentinels. I’m afraid I’ve no power to show you a picture, little one, I’m saving the genny to charge up my, yes, our Lens, so you’ll have to magine. The leaves, the tree’s hair, were green, like this, but more. While the blossoms were pink like my—

  Yes. Like the roses in our cheeks.

  I had never seen such a beautiful structure. To my raw eyes, behind their oldschool spectiglasses, it looked as if it had come out of an ancient Muddleeuro fairy-tale, one with Goblins and Witches and Wolves and Huntsmen. I’d read those tales before we’d come to this country; my mother, not knowing what part of Here we’d end up in, had shown me illustrations. On paperware, magine, what we called books that are all now gone; devoured by the flames of the so-called Righteous or the rising tides of the melting caps. On that first day outside the new school, I felt I was within such a tale, lookin
g at the very same gingerbread house where Hansel and Gretel had been drawn, tempted by the longing for other’s resource that blessed capital always inspires. The seniors’ building was not gingerbread, of course, but brick and wood, with a roof of pretty red clay tiles and windows arched in the style of the theocrats, paned in tiny diamonds that twinkled in the sunlight. I stood, spellbound. The trees behind the building sighed, and I saw a fabulous structure of metal and Glass emerge. A ship! I thought, yes, yes, foolishly. For it was no ship – simply an allmodcons extension built by the early technocrats during an Overspend phase. Fairy-tales paint pretty optics, but they’re less than useless for getting the real work of the Trinity done.

  I didn’t feel at home, standing outside the school; to me, home was still the Other Part we had come from. But there was something profoundly familiar about that little red-tiled building, its arched windows, its trees, that filled me, like Hansel and Gretel must have been filled, with a deep and hungry sense of be-longing. And yet, even now, yes, we, I, can’t help but wonder again, if I’m confused again, if it wasn’t the school that made me belong, but ah, hush, I come to you—

  Maisie.

  Have you a Mind’s I, little one? Don’t be shy, tell me. I’ll, yes, we’ll keep your secret; you were born with one, weren’t you? So, quietly, now: exercise that redundant nexus of gland, visualise with yes, us, me, this:

  I am ten. My shoes are too big. I walk into a classroom. It smells, like all Here smells, of bleach and clean. She stands. Sunlight oozing from long windows. Chalkdust off vintage blackboard dancing between us. In a corner, a line of jewelly-new smartAppls, chuckling as they connect to the Old Web.

  She sighs, as if magining. She looks up. She sees me. She smiles.

  If the school was a Muddleuro fairy-tale, Maisie was the magical creature at its heart. My first thought was – A Primcess™! She must be a Primcess™! In that time, all the children Here, even the poor ones, dressed like advertainments. In coloured fabrics, always new, and made by machines, and matching but not too much the same; just right for an army of growing corpocitizens, bound together by the good taste and carefully accumulated indentures of their parents.

  Maisie, though, stood out. She always had something a little Dated about her: the way she wore her hair, her Vintage accessories, her oldschool bag made with real leather handles, a Save the Cows genuinepassionstatement. Sometimes she even sported items of clothing that made her look as if no, yes, she’d come from an Other Part; the sort of things that my mother, faith forgive her, tried to make us wear. She had long yellow ringlets, no, golden, yes, of course, golden – yes, somewhat like mine, little one, it is yes, a peccadillo, yes though mine are fading now. That morning, Maisie wore a yellow dress, very Biba seventy-sixties – a style my mother would have called ladylike. But what most caught my eye were her shoes. Ah, such longing. Cowskin, they were, black as old Fossilfuel and burnished to an impossible shine, so when you looked down, you could see your face reflected in them, as when they had absorbed all your resource, mental-physical-and-the-other. But only, yes, only if your skin was pale, for not all of us, little one, had pale skin.

  Maisie’s own skin was white as cowmilk, stretched over a face shaped like a heart. Small wonder I magined her as a Primcess™.

  But Maisie was not just beautiful on the outside. She had a glow that came from deep in, and oh my, yes, how everyone loved her for that. Not just me or the other fortunate corpocitizens being cultivated in the balmy warmth of the school’s Glasshouse, but all connected with that institution. Educators, parents, Board. I could tell, even then, even me, through my naifOther pov, that Maisie was our school’s first and best optic; the personification of its holy essence, brand. She represented the crème of the technocracy: those first among the corpostate, gifted by birth into capital’s most luminous mysteries, the off-interest-one-per-cent. Yet she spoke too for the thrifty second-tier, those who had gained not through birth, but through wise investment and acquisition during the first bubbles, who had only then been inducted into the secrets of harnessing, the long, rewarding process of accumulation. And finally she stood for those who, though they had been less prudent with their resource, had learnt through suffering. I and my siblings counted my parents among that third group – for what was the ultimate lack of prudence but choosing to be placed, by capital’s anointed invisible hand, at the moment of one’s birth into an Other, less fortunate Part? In this country, that third group, the technocracy’s indentured, also included all ‘natives’ who had endured the requisite slings and arrows of Heilige Angelendtheresela’s Outragesterity. This was the group who had used their collective pain, their experience of have-not, relative as it may have been in the context of Others, to force into being the first and last great vision of our corpostate, that precious concept which still endures, despite the ravages of the so-called Righteous, their soosidebooms and chemfare, despite, yes, our own toxicity, acquired during the last great Overspend in the FF&W War. I’m talking – hush, no, yes, little one, this you must absorb and process – of the threefold hallowed truth itself: the Trinity. Capital Moral, Capital Social and Capital Holy Fiscal, wealth without end, aim-in.

  Maisie embodied the Trinity more completely than anyone I have ever known. She had, no, yes, has, no had a conscience; she had, yes, has a heart; she had, yes, had things. And she kept her three capitals in exquisite balance. Dressing well, but never ostentatiously. Mingling easily face-to-face, while ensuring she kept timespace for herself. Active when plugged in – full of goss and pins, well able to too-wit, share-invite and trolle – but always moderating her inputs. Tagging each trolleing with sad-face to demonstrate her rich stock of that valuable moral resource, remorse; leavening her sad-animal petitions with funny-cutey-tubevines that showed she still had a sense of humour. She was judicious in her use of smarts, never too obvs in displaying the most updated model or the latest apps. She wasn’t bothered by anyone else’s story or repulsed by where they lived or intrigued by how they’d got onto the Lists or laughed at what trainers they wore or sneered at where their mother worked, even if it was a zero-hour-tract at ma©donalds-you-loser.

  Maisie was also gifted with know-ware. She always came top of our class, though she never made anyone feel bad about that. We were happy for her to be there. She deserved to be. She goaded, yes, inspired, yes, drove us to compete, yes, harder, faster, longer, but was that not what we were there for?

  Many other children in the school were like Maisie; the technocracy had mergered them because they had something of the same glow. But nobody was quite as yes, golden. Despite my overactive Mind’s I, I couldn’t identify then exactly what it was Maisie had which we lacked. My first conjecture, and, yes, you may laugh, little one, was that her inner gleam was generated by Fossilfuel. Not literally. But all the children that glowed, Maisie included, had one thing in common; they were collected after school by their parents in Fossilcars. The rest of us, including the handful who’d come from Other Parts, had to walk home. My family’s new home wasn’t too far, so this arrangement suited us. Except, of course, when it rained; on those days I, yes, longed for a Fossilcar and a mother who wasn’t working zero-hour-tracts and a father who wasn’t too busy wrapped up his apps, or Skyقing with the right people so right things could get done.

  Maisie was collected by her mother, ah, no, yes, Mum. She was a real Yummamumma and her car was totes amazoid, an oldschool Guzzler, nothing loser-hybrid about it. Four-wheel drive, high off the ground with its shell sprayed a lovely colour. Deep, deep green. Not like this, not like anything you’ve ever seen, little one. A colour that made you feel the presence of capital, its threefold holy glow, as if the sacred resource was right inside you. Oh, that feeling, shining from the Guzzler, shining like Maisie’s black shoes, reflecting back to us standing before it their our their own pale faces, as if no, not yet, their innermostness had been captured by its gleaming Kellygreen convex lens.

  Interesting, said my father, when I told him this th
ought and, for a moment, the corrugated worry that normally occupied his forehead seemed to lift. A prickle went down my spine. It was unusual for him to pay attention to anything I said. But a moment later he had forgotten I was there, and had started talking to my older brother about the forthcoming FootBall Trials and the schoolership to top-notch higher ed they might offer.

  Yet this glow was not just restricted to the Guzzler, or Maisie herself. Maisie’s mother, yes, Mum, was shiny too. She had the same hair as Maisie but not as golden, yes, more like this, little one. She wore it up or down, or teased into smooth waves that were somewhat Dated. But on her, as on Maisie, the Datedness didn’t give off wrong optics; it looked newer-than-new. In winter, she wore fur coats – faux, naturally; Maisie’s sad-animal petitions would have tolerated nothing less. And she smelt gorgeous, Maisie’s Mum, oh yes. Like a bubble bath but nicer, a smell bleachy-sweet, very much of Here. Sometimes, in bed at night when I was alone, I indulged my Mind’s I and magined how it would be if our mother was more like that and smelt less of Other Parts, and more of Here.

  Every day, she would wait for Maisie at the gates as we came out of school; most of the other children already gazing elsewhere, plugged into smartsong and Appls and Glass, relieved at the thought of an afternoon free of the social tax of face-to-face. All except those of us from Other Parts, we who had limited connectivity at the best of times, and Maisie, who plugged in, it seemed, only when nobody could see her.

  Mum, yes, my Mum would wave and call ‘Maisie!’, the bracelets on her wrists, groovyethnic faux ivory bought for much fiscal from a moralshop that aided Other Parts, tinkling. Maisie would run over, not clumsy like no, yes, like I used to be, her long yellow, no, golden curls dancing in the sunlight. She’d kiss Mum and sling herself and her bag into the back seat. The Guzzler would start, purring like a cat – an animal; you’ve seen pictures of them, little one, they used to rule the tubevines – and whoosh down the drive.