by Ken MacLeod
Hope couldn’t think of a reply to that. Instead she asked, ‘How do you know about me? How did you know I was…’
‘ParentsNet,’ said Maya, looking away a little.
‘Oh,’ said Hope. ‘Well. That’s interesting. I start a thread and suddenly everybody knows my business.’
‘You know how it is,’ said Maya, sounding defensive for the first time. ‘It’s all out there. But the good thing about it is that you now have an army of flying monkeys.’
‘I didn’t ask for an army of flying monkeys!’
Maya looked abashed. ‘Well, sorry, at least we did help you there, and… Uh, do you have time for a coffee and a chat, maybe?’
Hope felt suddenly reckless. She deserved a bit of relaxation – not to mention explanation – more than she needed an hour’s pay.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Let’s do that.’
She expected Maya to ask her to suggest somewhere to go, but instead Maya nodded and smiled and set off down the street. Hope fell in beside her. On reaching the next junction, Maya put on a set of glasses and looked around. As she did so, Hope noticed what it was about the woman’s left hand that had struck her as odd a few minutes earlier. She wasn’t wearing a monitor ring.
Hope hadn’t seen a woman of childbearing age without a monitor ring since she didn’t know how long. It wasn’t compulsory, certainly not, but it was such a badge of adulthood – and indeed freedom, compared to the old system of monthly pregnancy tests and certification cards – that girls put them on long before they had the slightest intention or legal opportunity to drink alcohol, smoke or get pregnant. She’d seen ten-year-olds showing them off as if flashing engagement-ring rocks, though in these cases Hope rather suspected the rings were fake.
Maya led the way across the road, took a few confident steps onward, then stopped at the door of a small shop that didn’t at all promise coffee. Its faded sign still said Newspapers and Tobacco and it sold sweets, convenience food and emergency groceries. Maya strode inside, nodded to the Sikh woman at the counter, and asked for two coffees.
‘Real or instant?’
‘Real, thanks.’
The shopkeeper opened an airtight jar and scooped some ground coffee into a paper bag.
‘Milk?’ she asked.
Maya looked at Hope.
‘What kind would you like?’ Maya asked.
‘Uh, thanks, cappuccino, why not?’
‘Ah,’ said Maya. ‘I think the choice here is with or without milk.’
Hope shook her head. ‘OK, without, thanks.’
‘Just one,’ said Maya.
The shopkeeper measured a few mils of milk into a small plastic bottle, and popped a lid on it.
‘Five pounds,’ she said.
‘What!’ said Hope.
Maya grinned and raised a finger. ‘Wait.’
She paid, and then led the way through a plastic tape curtain to the back. Hope fought down a momentary apprehension and followed, out through a door to a back green with cracked concrete paths. Just ahead, in the middle of the green, was an area covered by a shallow roof of two sloping sheet-diamond panes, visible only from the drizzle-drops that misted them, and held up by four stout wooden posts. In its shelter were half a dozen tables with benches, and a scatter of small round tables with plastic chairs. There was a good and noisy crowd of twenty-odd people at the tables, eating, drinking, some of them smoking. It had been years since Hope had seen so many people smoking, openly, in one place. At the back, a young Asian guy sat behind a table, keeping an eye on people pouring water from electric kettles as they made their way past with cafetières and mugs.
Hope stopped dead.
‘I can’t go in here,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Maya, a step or two in front, looked over her shoulder.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You just take the ring off.’
‘But it’s dangerous,’ Hope said.
‘The smoke?’ Maya flapped a hand in front of her face. ‘Pffft!’
‘Well, no, I mean taking the ring off. It’ll get logged!’
‘The Health Centres look for patterns,’ said Maya. ‘Not odd incidents. Relax.’
Not feeling at all relaxed, Hope turned the monitor ring to loosen it, slid it slowly off her finger and stuck it in the bottom of her jeans pocket. She looked at the pale indentation around her finger above the gold wedding ring, and felt naked.
They found a table. Maya took the packet of coffee and the bottle of milk to the queue. Hope sat down. She could smell coffee, tea, bacon – rolls bought somewhere else, she guessed – and cigarette smoke. The crowd looked like a mixture of art students and building workers. Quite a few of both types were wearing glasses and obviously into some virtual scene. While Maya waited for the boiling water, Hope put her own glasses on. The overlay snapped into view, showing, as she’d expected, people posing as their online avatars: two of the art students looked like dragons, others wore strange strappy costumes or had features like manga characters, all big eyes and chiselled cheekbones. Four lads stooped intently over a tabletop football match on a pitch the size of two chessboards. Hope was amused to see that they kept their mugs and plates off the virtual field. In a far corner, Indian Air Force jets made repeated bombing runs on a forested mountain slope, red and black blooms rising above the green.
Maya joined the queue and glanced back. Hope caught her features in the glasses, framed the face, and – guessing at the spelling of her name – tapped out a search. About a second later she was looking at a full-face photo of Maya, and all her occupational and educational details. Brunel MA (Hons.) in law and government, gap year in Nepal, front-line post in an Advice Centre, campaigns against refugee deportations, member of Liberty and Amnesty, assiduous writer of letters to the web… a troublemaker, without a doubt.
She took the glasses off, rather guiltily, when Maya returned with a full cafetière and two mugs.
‘Isn’t this illegal?’ Hope asked. ‘An outdoor smoking area?’
Maya shook her head. ‘It’s not open to the public and they’re not serving the coffee or tea. The shop sells very expensive dry coffee and tea bags. What the customers do with it is their business. There just happens to be a place out the back where as a favour the customers can use the family’s kettles.’
‘And seats, and tables, and shelter.’
‘Well, you know how it is with extended families,’ said Maya, hand poised over the plunger. ‘They need lots of room for gettogethers.’
‘The inspectors will find some way to shut it down. Otherwise more people would be doing it.’
Maya smiled. ‘More are. More than you’d think. Smoke-easies. Shebeens. Drinking sheds.’ She tapped her glasses, in her shirt pocket. ‘There’s a black app for finding them.’
Hope was not interested in black apps. She felt disquieted that Maya actually had one on her glasses.
‘No, I meant like cafés and so on.’
‘That’s not how it works,’ Maya said. ‘If you’re running a café or a pub, the problem with a workaround like this is that it isn’t covered by insurance. Suppose someone were to scald themselves with the kettle! Or trip and hurt themselves! Nightmare. You run into all kinds of legal minefields even before the health inspectors come down on you. And if they do, they can close a café. The most they can do with this is stop the shop owner from letting people use their back yard. Or someone else’s back yard, for all I know. It’s legally quite tricky. In fact what usually happens is the shop owner just stops for a bit, and a place just like it pops up somewhere nearby. Rinse and repeat.’
She pushed the plunger down, and poured. Hope breathed in fragrant steam, blew, and sipped.
‘Why did you come here anyway?’ she asked. ‘Instead of to a café, I mean? You don’t smoke, do you?’
‘I’m a consenting and mildly addicted passive smoker,’ said Maya, inhaling a passing wisp. ‘I should explain. I work in an Advice Centre, out in Hayes. Lots of refugees and DPs, you know? W
hich means I work with people who – I’m not making this up – will list smoking under “outdoor activities”.’
They laughed.
‘But that’s not why I picked here,’ Maya went on. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, hand waving. ‘It’s sort of relevant to your problem, sort of an example…’
‘Oh yes, my problem,’ said Hope. She put the coffee mug down, hard. ‘You have some explaining to do.’
Maya did some explaining.
Hope put her elbows on the table and her palms across her eyes.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve been stalked or something.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Maya. ‘Really you haven’t. It’s just that, you know, you posted on ParentsNet, and then that other mum at your school uploaded yesterday’s little contretemps, and—’
‘Yes, I bloody know that!’ Hope snapped. ‘But that science woman, what did she have to poke her nose in for?’
‘For God’s sake!’ said Maya. ‘She hasn’t done anything. She just told me about you, and I came up with an idea to help. To let you know you’re not alone. And come on, I did help.’
‘Yes,’ said Hope. ‘For today. But that doesn’t do me much good, does it?’
‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ said Maya, sounding both exasperated and embarrassed. ‘About ways you can deal with the situation.’
Hope decided to give Maya a chance. ‘OK,’ she said.
Maya leaned back, as if making a conscious decision to get out of Hope’s face, and waved expansively. ‘The first way,’ she said, ‘is the kind of thing people do here.’
‘Drink coffee and smoke?’
‘No,’ said Maya. ‘Find workarounds. Look, I understand how you must feel, like everything’s closing in on you. The health centre, the school, the insurance soon enough… I know all about that sort of thing, because I deal with it every day. Laws and bureaucracy, God! But the point is, if you really want to, you can get around it.’
‘Like?’
‘Take the school, for example. All those mums who’re giving you trouble – well, maybe you can shame them by going to school in a group with mums who support you.’
‘I don’t know any,’ said Hope.
‘OK, but have you looked? Asked? Anyway’ – Maya waved a hand again – ‘let’s leave that for the moment. Sooner or later the insurance issue will come up – the school will be told it can’t be insured against your little boy, or rather you can’t be insured. Now, you have alternatives there: you could home-school…’
‘No way!’
‘… or join a parents’ school group. I can help you find some.’
‘No, again. I’m not taking Nick out of the nursery.’
‘Well… in that case, there are alternative sources of insurance cover you might consider. Mainly religious – Islamic, some kinds of Catholic, even, uh, Mennonite and so on, you know, sects. They’ll all cover you and the school will have to accept that you’re covered, because of various non-discrimination acts – you see how it works, you use one part of the law against others?’
Hope looked at the dregs of her coffee.
‘Want another coffee?’ she said.
Maya nodded. Hope used the five minutes it took to buy the powder and milk and queue for the water to think over why she objected so much to Maya’s well-meant suggestions. By the time she got back, she thought she had it.
‘I don’t want to sneak around,’ she said. ‘That’s what “workaround” means to me. I don’t want to live in some hole-and-corner way, relying on the goodwill of sects and cults, thank you very much. I just want to live like everybody else.’
‘OK, OK,’ Maya said, again with the backing-off body language. ‘All right, let’s see how you can do it mainstream.’ She gave an embarrassed smile. ‘Have you thought of writing to your MP?’
Hope stared at her. ‘What would be the point of that?’
‘More than you’d think,’ said Maya. ‘They still take letters from constituents seriously. And come on, your MP is one of the better ones. Jack Crow.’
‘He even lives around here,’ Hope said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, now I come to think of it. He knocked on our door at the last election.’
‘An MP who canvasses?’ said Maya. ‘My, my. Did you vote for him?’
‘None of your business,’ Hope said.
Maya nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘But I did,’ Hope added.
Maya looked surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to be—’
‘Oh, no,’ Hope said. ‘I’m not. No, I don’t believe in all that, but it’s – well, it’s two things. One is my job, you know? In China? So I’m all for that side of it, the war and so on; we really have to, you know, defeat those people. And the other is, uh, my husband. He’s from the Highlands and he’s half native, as he puts it, and I don’t know if you know what the people up there are like, but I swear if he even thought I was going to vote any other way he’d walk out on me.’
‘Really?’
Hope laughed. ‘It’s a slight exaggeration, but he takes it all very seriously.’
‘Ah!’ said Maya. ‘So he might be quite pleased if you were to take it so seriously that you’d actually join the—’
‘What! I couldn’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘I mean, look at me!’
‘I’m looking at a regular Islington mum.’
‘Exactly! And my accent! Come on, I’m a Home Counties middle-class girl.’
Maya put a hand across her mouth and pinched her nostrils as if stifling a giggle.
‘I think you’ll find,’ she said when she’d ostensibly recovered, ‘that you’ll fit right in.’
That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn’t hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink. She signed the letter in what she hoped was a sufficiently similar ink and script, and sealed the envelope. She looked up Jack Crow and was about to address the letter to him at the House of Commons, when she noticed that his own address was only a few streets away. The following morning, after dropping off Nick – no problems this time – she took the letter round and posted it through the letter box of the MP’s house, a modest multi-household Victorian jerry-built tenement like her own but with, she was quite pleased to see, one floor fewer. It seemed appropriately modest, for one of the better MPs, one who lived in his constituency and actually canvassed.
As soon as she got home, Hope joined up. A few days later she got a package in the post enclosing: a plastic membership card with an offer of a Co-op Bank loan and a data chip containing more information about the Party, the movement, and parliamentary procedure than she could possibly live long enough to read; a welcome letter; and a plastic badge in the shape of a circle with a logo in fake enamel of a torch, a shovel and a quill pen. Around the border were the words LABOUR PARTY and across the middle was the word LIBERTY.
This looked promising. She pinned the badge to her coat collar at once. She knew that Hugh must have noticed it in the hallway when he came home, but he made no comment.
8. Subject Positions
That same evening, Geena walked home from Hayes to Uxbridge, thinking about Hope Morrison. Over another, slightly less chilly, lunch by the canal two days earlier, Maya had explained how she’d helped. Geena had been relieved by the moderation of the actions Maya had taken, and by the modesty of her proposals. But that wasn’t why she was thinking about Hope. She was thinking about her because she didn’t understand her.
It was a fine evening, the sun already set and the western sky before her lurid with greens and purples. Post-rush-hour traffic whispered past along Dawley Roa
d, and then Hillingdon Road, leaving a faint waft of ethanol that set her monitor ring a-tingling. Heathland and golf course held up the horizon on her left. Lights came on in crowded suburban semis and went off in office and industrial blocks beyond them to her right. Geena strode along, boot-heels clicking, coat-tails snapping, head up, her glasses subtly enhancing the lower part of the visual field and flagging irregularities in the pavement so she didn’t trip on any of them while she gazed straight ahead and took in the glorious sky and pondered the theoretical problem of Hope.
The problem, as Geena saw it, was this. Inside people’s heads were brains, and these were increasingly well understood, or so Geena was given to understand. Her eyes had always glazed over at the details. But neurology subtends ideology, as Dr Ahmed Estraguel was fond of reminding his students; the object – the celebrated double handful of grey matter – subtends the subject. And the subject itself is no dumb internal essence, no spiritual spark jumping undetected across the synaptic gap. No. The subject speaks itself into being, and it speaks in – what else? – language. And language, from the first babble to the last sigh, articulates ideology. How could it not? Language arises spontaneously out of human interactions, and scientific knowledge of these interactions doesn’t. Language is necessarily freighted with illusion.
So, in the first instance, human subjects constitute themselves out of ideology, even if – especially if – they call that ideology common sense. Common sense, Geena thought, would tell her that the sun had set. Scientific practice, as embodied in her glasses, showed her exactly where the sun was, a few degrees below the horizon.
She paused at the pedestrian crossing at a roundabout, looking in several directions before stepping out, even though the little man was green. Her glasses showed her vehicles outside her line of sight, and reassured her that all was safe. On the other side of the road she paused again, to take in a rare sight revealed by her leftward glance: an airliner on approach to Heathrow. Seen, as now, head-on, with its landing lights and wing lights all in a row, it looked remarkably like a flying saucer. For seconds at a time it seemed to hang still in the air, lights shimmering a little in the haze and relative warmth rising from the ground. And then the angle changed, and the illusion – tenuous enough with the airliner’s flight number tagged beside it by her glasses – was replaced by the unarguable, unmistakable cruciform of the craft.