by Ivo Stourton
The girl was running through the atrium and he shouted at her to stop. She sprinted on, parting two shoppers with a shove of her shoulder. She had the papers clutched in her right hand, and they flapped like a bird being held by the legs as she ran. He raised his gun again, but the marble floors were thronged with shoppers, their sense of danger deadened by the calm music and pleasantly familiar brands. For a second he felt his finger quivering on the trigger, but her youth kept her safe. In another second she was gone, and the files with her.
He walked over to the boy lying face down on the marble concourse, his blood pooling silently around him. The spinning lights of the adverts reflected in the crimson puddle. He shoed the gun away from the body. He spun the boy over and saw in his eyes that shocked animal expression which had made Oates an atheist at the age of nineteen in the desert. He reached inside the boy’s pocket, and pulled out his wallet. The wallet was empty except for a single printed business card. It said, Dwayne Jeffries, born 11 June 2016, died in the cause of Mortal Reform, 21 November 2035.
For a moment he felt as if he was about to be sick, and he stood with his hands on his knees breathing heavily.
M.R. The symbol springing up all over London. The Mortal Reformers.
A spook from counter-terrorism had come in to give a training session on the Mortal Reformers. Oates remembered it particularly because Anna had had one of their posters on her wall. He’d spent the whole session staring at the bloke, thinking about what he’d do to him if he tried to arrest his daughter. Then he’d gone home that evening and made Anna take it down, leading to much talk of fascism, free speech and who was living under whose roof.
Oates wasn’t much interested in politics. It was a hangover from life in the army, where it had been helpful not to inquire too deeply into the motives of those giving the orders. Anna was though. Because of her, and because of what was on her wall, he had listened closely to the briefing.
The spook had given some background to the movement in his lecture. The decision to label the Mortal Reformers a Proscribed Organisation under the Terrorism Act had been a controversial one. He ran through the handful of MPs who had previously been members of the political wing, and had now been dismissed, triggering a rash of byelections. He projected flowcharts showing the party structure, key supporters, sources of support and fundraising.
The core of the movement was a student thinktank that predated the invention of the Treatment, called the Centre for Policy for Inter-Generational Fairness. They weren’t much in thinking up snappy names, but they set out to highlight how increasing longevity screwed over the young. Longer and larger state pensions, more expensive end of life care funded by taxes, and the eldest holding on to jobs and real estate for periods without historical precent, all at a time of rising birth rates and youth immigration. Oates hadn’t ever really considered any of these things, but he could trace their effects into riots and crime he dealt with on the streets. The CPIF had been making some headway and gathering some influential friends in government, right up until the Treatment came along.
The Treatment had exacerbated all the problems which CPIF had sought to combat. It also strengthened the resolve of the powerful to resist any change. When death had been inevitable, the thought of relinquishing some of their privileges had been acceptable. After all, you couldn’t take it with you. With eternal life before them, they saw no reason to give anything up. You still couldn’t take it with you, but what if you didn’t have to go?
As the reform agenda failed, the revolutionary voices within the movement started to get a better hearing. Fringe elements had attached themselves to the CPIF – neo-Marxists focused on capital accumulation in the hands of the undying, Malthusian Green extremists obssessed with population explosion, religious fundamentalists decrying the perversion of God’s will. They brought with them a heritage of direct action and protest in contrast to the CPIF’s methods of lobbying and persuasion. The organisation changed its name to the Mortal Reformers. Between the prevailing economic conditions, the support of music heroes, and the atmosphere of wordy political theory, students flocked to them. The more the government tried to shut them down, the more attractive they became to the real-young. Anna had been one of them.
The boy on the ground was about the same age as Anna would have been. The girl who he had been about to shoot had looked like her. But it couldn’t have been Anna, because she had been killed on the road two summers before.
It had been the darkest time of his life. Oates had heard the phrase survivor guilt, but he had never considered before its application. It had never troubled him in the war because they had all lived with the threat of death. Oates knew that if death came for him he would not begrudge his mates their survival, and because he attributed similar sentiments to his comrades, his mourning for them was a clean fellow-feeling. For Anna, he felt only guilt. He looked over the crime scene photographs taken after the accident. The driver had had a heart attack at the wheel, and wasn’t prosecuted.
On the street where Anna had been hit the cherry trees were in bloom, and their blossoms had blown into the blood pooled by the roadside. Oates would touch the glossy surface of the photos with his finger and feel nothing but self-reproach. It got into every nook and cranny of life, so that to make a sandwich was to eat in spite of her death. How dare he be hungry, with Anna dead? How dare he take out the rubbish, with Anna dead? It was a betrayal to fix the leaking tap in the bathroom, because with Anna dead the leaking tap should have had no meaning, and to give it meaning placed it on a parity with Anna in the order of significance. What kind of monster fixed a leaking tap, with his daughter in the ground and the man who did it still free somewhere under the London sky?
A couple of weeks after it happened, he’d been clearing out her room. No sense in leaving her stuff in there, when there were charity shops who’d be grateful to have it. He’d found the Mortal Reformers poster he’d made her take down from her wall. She hadn’t thrown it out, as she’d promised to do, just hidden it under her bed. He’d unrolled it in his lap. It was a picture split lengthways in two – on one side was a shot of an upmarket London street, the kind where people bought investment properties. It was nightime, but not a single light burned in any of the windows. The owners were off in other houses, in other countries. On the right hand side were ranks of rough sleepers sheltering under the curve of a brick tunnel. He had looked at the picture for a while, and then stuck it back up on her wall. He couldn’t bring himself to touch anything else.
Oates had not realised how impossible it had become to discuss death until the need to do so had arisen. In the crematorium they’d had no service, and she was in the oven and up the chimney faster than cooking a microwave dinner. The next family were already waiting when they came out. They had the urn sent on. He couldn’t even talk to Lori about it. He had never considered the evolving mortal taboo in relation to himself and his wife, but if he had he would have assumed that as with the rest of society’s ridiculousness, the two of them would close the door on it when they got into bed together. But when Anna died he discovered it was not so.
Grief, even in the privacy of the home, even in the privacy of the head, was unseemly. The only acceptable response was to pretend as quickly as possible that the person who had died had never existed. They were an unperson, like rebels disappeared by some despotic regime. To talk about them was dangerous, as if it brought the threat of death closer to the person you were talking to. Only in private memories were the dead allowed an existence. He had withdrawn into these memories, moving away from the living members of his family to spend time with his dead daughter.
Lori said nothing to him about all this at first. His silences grew longer and his temper shorter. He came home drunker and later. The night she finally tried to talk to him became a confrontation. He accused her of not feeling anything, and she said she wished she had never married him. They might have come to blows if their shouting hadn’t woken Mike, who was suddenly standing s
leep-fuddled in the door to the kitchen. The two of them were ashamed to find themselves in the midst of the strewn cigarette butts, the empty bottle, the smashed glass and all the debris of domestic conflict. Oates had whisked him up in his strong arms, and the two of them kissed him, and when he was back in bed they kissed each other.
All this rushed in on him as he looked at the dead boy. It was an importunate deluge of irrelevant emotion, like a burp in church, like hiccups in a eulogy, brought on by the sight of what he had done to the boy, and his horrible memory of the brief moment of exhilaration he had felt returning fire.
A police Sergeant and a couple of bobbies had joined the security men in the circle. One of the shoppers was holding a camera phone up over the heads of the police, filming the body with Oates beside it. The repairing of this rift in the social fabric, this sudden eruption of violence, was already underway. The ambulance was being called, the officers were forming a cordon around the victim and moving people along, and soon the body would be lifted, photographs would be taken, and then a man in overalls would come and scrub the area with a mop, and within the walls of One New Change it would be as if Dwayne Jeffries had never existed.
“You shot him,” the Sergeant observed.
“He was shooting at me.”
The big man nodded slowly, as if that was only to be expected.
“You’ll have to wait for the internal investigators now then.”
The thought of spending any more time in the midst of these shops with their twinkling Chistmas lights was unbearable.
“I can’t wait.”
“Internal investigations need to be called in whenever there’s a shooting.”
“I’m not stopping, Sergeant. You’ve got my number, and my governor’s Superintendent John Yates, Metropolitan police.”
The Sergeant hesitated, and Oates could see him weighing up whether or not to escalate his attempts to detain him.
“You’ll need to talk to security about how best to get the ambulance in here,” Oates said.
“We’ve enough to be getting on with with those boys outside…”
“And stop those fucking people filming.”
“Alright. But you’re supposed to wait for internal investigations, end of.”
Oates walked away from the little pile of death, and headed for the stairs. The Sergeant watched him go for a few paces, then turned and started shouting orders to his men. Quite a crowd was forming, and Oates had to push his way through them. At the back, he thought he recognised a couple of the kids who had been repulsed from the entrance by the massed ranks of the Yorkshire constabulary. They had found another way in. Most of their faces were black or mixed race, and Oates had a thought, rising for a moment above the others – Dwayne Jeffries looked like a mixed race boy, but dark enough to be black if that was what you wanted to call him. And that’s what the press and the lairy boys from the estates would want to call him. The Superintendent was going to love that. Oates tried to focus only on the practical repercussions of what he had done. He could feel his conscience making a space inside him for the guilt.
How had the girl known what he was carrying? The only person who had known of his mission was Grape. But why would she have betrayed him? And to whom? If someone wanted the contents of Hector’s file bad enough to shoot a policeman for it, the simplest thing would have been to go and take it. Grape had given him Hector’s address herself. Oates’s mind turned to the smoke-filled interior of the car he had seen parked up on Haggerston Road. If it was a stake out, it fit with the youth and the punkish incompetence of his robbers.
On the road he tried to call Bhupinder back, but the phone went straight through to voicemail. The walls of the Great Spa admitted no signal. Bhupinder must have been coming all the way out through the gates to call him. How many calls had he missed?
Driving through London, the clouds were low and the river ran high. It had been a mistake to close down the schools. Some of the groups of kids hanging out on the Shoreditch High Street might otherwise have been in class, and they already had their hoods up. They milled in groups of five or six, laughing and playing on their phones, circled by outriders on BMXs. They were children waiting for the shops that excluded them to become a playground. The police had no luck – the rain and the wind might have tamped the riots down, but the rain had stopped.
The supermarket was still open, and there was a queue outside the cinema full of shop assistants and teachers using their unexpected half-day. There was no violence yet, no break at all in the lawful pattern. Some of the men and women excused from their offices even lent the city a carnival atmosphere. But he could feel people waiting for the sun to go down like the audience waiting for the lights to go down in a theatre.
He pulled into a petrol station east of the Limehouse Link and bought petrol from a man behind bullet-proof glass. He got changed into the seventies suit in the toilet and stuffed his armour and his gun in his duffel bag. He straightened his tie in the pocked metal mirror. For a fraction of a second, he caught a glimpse of Dwayne Jeffries’s face in the distorted darkness over his shoulder, the eyes rolling in mortal bafflement. All that soul rubbish given the lie as the blood and breath disappeared. Born 11 June, 2016. The same year as Anna. You would have shot me, you little bastard, but I got there first. Now fuck off. He tried to be firm with himself, but the harsh words sounded hollow. He didn’t want to have killed the boy. Lori would make it alright for him. But he couldn’t see her again until the Egwu business was done with. The toilet was lit in blue neon to stop junkies from finding their veins, and it made his face look old.
SEEN BY THE light of day, the Great Spa seemed less mysterious, but somehow no less threatening than it had in the small hours of the morning. In the dim sunlight the coloured bulbs glowed but faintly, and Oates could see brown streaks on the white flanks of the dome, and something which might have been a hawk or a falcon circling the pinnacle. The benthic calm of the floodlit plains around the perimeter became merely grubby: a fly-tipper’s paradise. The dome had shed that weird aura of the organic, and assumed instead a massive mundanity. Its dirty gigantism, its belittling of the private dwellings which surrounded it now seemed more like the fascist or communist architecture of the mid-twentieth century, mongrelled with the shopping malls of the twenty-first.
Yet it was not until Oates had driven off the motorway and turned into the drive of the Great Spa itself that he became aware of the most significant change. He drove past the turning to the service entrance that had deceived him on his first approach, and passed on towards the reception area he had left that morning. He was still perhaps a mile from the gates when he was brought to a halt by an impenetrable queue of traffic. Where last night there had been only the orderly desolation of the wasteland, now there was chaos. One or two of the vehicles he saw were news vans, another was a tow truck trying to rescue a spavined Mini rolled off the road by its owners, but the majority seemed to be the kinds of ordinary families Oates had passed on the road streaming out of London.
He wound down the window, reached up and stuck the detachable siren onto the roof of his car. The light alone did nothing to clear the way, so he switched on the wail. It seemed at first as if this too would be ignored, but gradually, with a bad grace the cars clogging up the approach began to nudge aside. Robocars were programmed to shift out of the way automatically in response to a signal from the siren, but they were hemmed in by the old fashioned manual vehicles in the crush. Even with the light and siren some drivers still seemed to begrudge him his wing mirrors, and it took almost fifteen minutes for him to reach the manned checkpoint and the barriers that separated the road from the private carpark within the steel ring of the fence, where the guests’ cars were arranged in their neat grid.
The guards, who were standing with their guns outside the barrier, paid no attention to his approach, and when he gestured to the man in the booth to lift the pneumatic arm and lower the mechanical teeth at the entrance, the man shook his head and wa
ved at the crowd. Oates turned off the siren and got out, leaving the car parked on the road. The guards were arguing loudly with a couple of men, and one woman who held the bundle of a baby in her arms. Just out of sight of the security men, a boy with his trousers pulled down and his shirt held up to his nipples in both hands was peeing against the corner of the gatehouse.
Oates took his badge with him and flashed it at the guards as he passed the barrier. He walked up to an older man who seemed to be in charge, speaking into an earpiece some feet behind the checkpoint.
“Who are you?”
“DCI Oates, Metropolitan Police.”
“If you’re here for the murder just head on through and they’ll see you at the desk.”
“What’s going on here?”
“Some of them have relations in the spa, or they say they do. They want to be let in to stay with them tonight, or pick them up and take them further outside London. The news people are here because someone tipped them off about the murder, although now they’re starting to talk to the people stuck in the jam, and the rest of them, buggered if I know. I think they just saw a queue and joined the back.”
Oates turned to look back down the long file of cars. People in London were frightened, they wanted out of the city for the night, but not all of them had somewhere else to go. The rich could be relied upon to take care of themselves. The security here was obvious enough. If you couldn’t afford a motel and you didn’t want to spend another night in your flat with the lights off, hoping no one tried to rob you, then parking up under one of those gun towers must have seemed an attractive option. Although bad tempered, there was no sign that the drivers were ready to force their way into the carpark, but nor were they leaving; the cars had simply begun to drive away from the barriers and over the hard shoulder, out around the edges of the fence. They clustered for company around the chainlink like old horses put out in a field.