by J. T. Marsh
After the war fifteen years ago, still there are many working men who work themselves tired and sore every day and who return home to bare cupboards, broken windows, and faulty switches, as if his rising has only prompted a new wave of anger and discord in the hearts of they who would deign to fight back. This, Valeri knows; as the hot and sticky early-summer’s morning makes him sweat, he goes to his apartment building’s shared washroom and turns on the shower’s tap only to find nothing comes out. On the door, on his way out, he notices a sign declaring the building’s water out for an indeterminate length of time. Valeri sighs and returns to his unit to give himself a sponge bath using jugs of water kept in the kitchen cupboard for exactly these occasions. “Save some of that for washing the clothes,” says a woman, “if you ever plan on washing them, that is.” She thinks nothing of approaching Valeri even as he’s nude. And he thinks nothing of being nude in front of her, not even bothering to turn to face her much less conceal himself behind his towel. Life in Britain’s crowded working class flats has become too hard for embarrassment over such things.
Valeri’s roommate is a young woman named Hannah, her hair as red and fiery as her temper. She walks into the main room and approaches Valeri, intending to ask him where he’d been. He can hardly believe all the years that’d passed since the two were children, playing in the yard of her childhood home in the northern hinterlands. All those years ago, before the rising that took his parents, she would’ve never imagined they’d be in want of running water. She says, “you must be tired by now.” But Valeri says, “you’d think so.” They exchange knowing looks, not unlike the knowing looks Valeri exchanges, from time to time, with Sydney. With Hannah, though, the moment is entirely absent any romantic or sexual overtones, rather that of one member of a close-knit family concerned for the other. He tells her what he saw on the screens, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. “I’ve seen it too,” she says, reaching into the cabinet for a brush, “and it only means more work for me.” Valeri tosses a look over his shoulder and says, “but you enjoy that, don’t you?” But she’s gone.
Even today, Valeri is not what he seems to be, with a mop of unruly hair, black as oil and twice as dirty. His boots are held together by the glue he’d applied himself, the glue he keeps on applying whenever his boots start to come apart at the seams again. Nearly everything he owns, he owns second-hand, given by a friend or family, or outright bought at one of the charity shops doing brisk business in his part of town. His little flat overlooks a gravel lot where, late at night he can often spot illicit drugs, cash changing hands, in smaller quantities each time. In the little flat he shares with his roommate, they live on the edge of the working class district, almost within sight of the glass and steel towers reaching for the sky. Earlier in the month, Valeri spotted a sign, erected, he thinks, during his day, though he also thinks it might’ve been there for a long time and this is just the first time he’s noticed it. The sign boasts of a coming development, in big, bold letters marking the future site of luxury apartments, right on the edge of the working man’s part of town, right at the boundary separating one world from the next. It’s an open secret this luxury development is not meant to house people; scarcely anyone in Britain could afford the million or so pounds to buy in, save a few who already have everything they need, and even those few would never want to live among the restless rabble. Amid constant shortages of the essentials of life, the livelihoods of men like Valeri are traded like cattle by men wearing suits that cost more than he makes in a year. As the night is always darkest just before dawn, the lives of working men like Valeri are so filled with despair at the moment before their liberation is at hand.
While Valeri lives in the working-class part of London, Sydney lives somewhere else, not quite in the wealthy part but in what another time might’ve called the middle-class part, back when there was such a thing. “Are you always so…” she starts, seeming to search for the right word. “…Pensive?” she asks, once, as he sits on the edge of his bed after they’ve had each other. She seems naively unaware of the fight in the streets threatening to explode into war at any moment. “I like to think before I speak,” he says, thinking of the gravestone he visits every month, once a month, noting himself the steward of his family’s future. “Too many people speak before they think,” she says. He turns back to face her, finding her sitting propped up against the bed’s headboard, and as he leans in for a kiss he chooses to imagine she believes everything he believes, even as she doesn’t. Then, he says, “let them,” and pulls back from her before saying, “the value of truth doesn’t change only because everyone else is lying.” She nods. It’s a lesson Valeri’s come to learn in life, but at some personal cost. Struggling to control his urge to lash out at any authority is Valeri’s day-to-day task, a routine well-rehearsed from his boyhood days when he’d turn against every teacher and thumb his nose at every after-school nanny, only to come home and find his mother and father tired.
After night has fallen the dogs come out, sirens wailing as the troopers speed by in their lorries, chasing the latest hotspot. Across the city the sounds of explosions booming can be heard, here and there, intermittent like the summer’s rain. A crisis looms in the night. As the workers, the students, and the parishioners have yielded the streets for the night, the streetlights flickering on, one by one. While the working man sleeps, the wealthy man schemes, hosting meetings in his boardroom on the top floor of a sleek, stylish, glass and steel tower situated almost exactly at the city’s centre. The wealthy man has always schemed, true, to harvest what rightfully belongs to the working man and to reinvest his harvest anew, but this time is different. This time, so late at night with the city’s lights splayed across the darkness, the wealthy man raises his glass and toasts his own ingenuity, the boardroom filling with the sound of glasses clinking. Meanwhile, across town, Valeri thinks on the way it’s all happening again, seemingly just as the way his parents and their generation were provoked into rising fifteen years ago. But they, at least, had some small measure of personal comfort in their lives; as a generation, not everything had yet been taken from them. After Valeri and Sydney part ways again, each carrying the implicit threat of a permanent separation, he barely has time to throw on his tattered old clothes and bound out the door himself before there’s the sound of a booming explosion, rolling in across the city like a smoothly undulating wave. Still a ways off from the rising of our apocalypse, and already all of Britain seems at war with itself, caught in an orgy of hatred and recrimination fuelled by the ghosts of yesteryear. Still there’re burnt-out shells of blocks set ablaze fifteen years ago, still there’re collapsed ruins of roadblocks bulldozed by police, and still there’s the lingering threat of the next rising in all.
The wealthy man’s is a scheme to change nothing real, not at first, but to rearrange fictional entities, entities that exist only on paper, creating distance where there’s none, instituting a complicated legal framework wherein relationships are obscured, mangled, creatively redefined until it’s all just right. Once given the ministry’s seal of approval, a rubber stamp, it’s expected to be sprung on the working man, the unsuspecting public; by then, it’ll be too late to stop. There’ll be squabbling in parliament among the self-interested members, but nothing will come of it. It’ll prove to be one of history’s most perverse ironies when this scheme, the grandest of all, turns against him. This time, though, it’s different. This time, while waiting for their rubber stamp, the architects of this new arrangement realize belatedly what’s happened, that news will break over the coming days on their collusion with one another to parcel off the property of others and sell what doesn’t belong to them so as to enrich themselves. This is the news that’s broken on the screens of Valeri and his fellow workers at the shop, this is the news that seems not to bother Hannah, and this is the news that’s compelled Sydney to act in her capacity to rid the shop of a tenth of its workers. Amid the light rattling of distant gunfire, the day’s work rushes on.
It’s hardly the first time they’ve been found to so scheme; they’ve been so scheming since the advent of our way of life. And although a few of them might pay some small price for their collusion, this is not but the latest proof on the insidious way the wealthy man can, writ large, not only survive but thrive in his duplicity and in his conspiracy. In handing to the wealthy man a slap on the wrist, the way of things implicitly endorses and condones his thievery, channelling it through an apparatus that recognizes his place and enshrines in law his ownership of that which isn’t his. In the street on the way to the bus stop that day, there’re more troopers speeding about, taking the homeless, the prostitutes, and even the odd worker into their lorries to be tossed into a jail somewhere in the Welsh highlands. It’s become a routine of sorts. The police step up their disappearings, targeting only those whom no one can particularly care that much about. It’s not part of some well-planned strategy but a well-rehearsed act played out from instinct. The police and their managerial apparatchiks might dress up their acting out in the air of some master plan, but in truth they lash out all the same as the crowds of workers, students, and parishioners who fill the streets so often. For Valeri, the news breaks that day not to a muted ambivalence among his fellow workers in union but to a rousing anger, the whole lot of them gathering around their screens to mutter expletives and trade thinly-veiled threats against their enemy. For a time, it seems a wildcat strike might break out right on the floor. But it’s not to be. The threat of losing their pittance is enough, for now, to keep them in line, as with all the other workers in all the other shops across Britain. But it won’t be that way for much longer. Valeri looks forward to the coming gathering at the union hall, where it’s expected they’ll raise the votes needed to take part in the planned general strike. This, he thinks, is the fighting back he finds his element in. He’s only half-right.
At work, days after they’ve last had each other, Sydney walks past Valeri, like every other encounter the two trading surreptitious glances. But, unlike every other time, this time she quickly and quietly drops a folded-up scrap of paper in his lap. He stashes it in his back pocket, only later, when he has a moment to himself retrieving it and reading it. ‘Love you.’ The rest of his day he thinks to ask her what it means, but he sees her nowhere, and she doesn’t respond to his messages. He leaves confused and disoriented. Still in this early period, with fallen wages and fallen bodies, men like Valeri, in love with women like Sydney, see for themselves a future which can only still-more privations. But for Valeri, in love with Sydney, he thinks of his parents killed by a hail of bullets in the failed revolution fifteen years ago and feels emboldened. His roommate, Hannah, settles for a more comforting remembering of the failed rising, having been living in a small city up in the provincial hinterland. That was before the last of the factories closed and Hannah’s father, Valeri’s uncle, found himself out of work for a very long time. Now, in the city, the days see her tie her hair back neatly and tightly into a bun while donning a nurse’s teal scrubs; she looks workmanlike, yet authoritatively feminine. By the end of her shift, she’ll be covered in the sweat and blood of patients dead and dying, and her hair’ll be a tangled, matted mess. This has become her routine.
When Sydney takes Valeri by the hand and leads him into her bed, she says, “I love you,” before pushing him down and falling on top of him. He reaches for her hair and runs a hand through, then says, “I love you too.” She kisses him, then breaks the kiss to say, “I’ve been in love with you from the moment I first saw you.” He kisses her, then breaks the kiss to say, “I know.” It’s still so early, but in this day and age the twenty- and thirty-somethings like them have learned to move quickly with their relationships, lest events overtake them and tear them apart before they’ve even had the chance to say the words. It’s hard, when men like Valeri have so little, to cling to such things as love for the almost-spiritual sustenance they crave. Amid the cracked, graffiti-covered façade of his apartment building and the sidewalks littered with cigarette butts, used needles, and persons sleeping in whatever little alcove can offer shelter for the night, there’s a spark waiting to be struck, a spark which might grow to a towering inferno that would consume all. But first, we look through this early period and we wonder if freedom will ever come to be.
In the local hospital’s A&E room, Hannah tends to an overdose, struggling to take a blood pressure reading while the overdose writhes in place. He goes into cardiac arrest; they can’t save him. They don’t often save them. A new drug’s ripped through the working class neighbourhoods. This nameless young man isn’t the first Hannah’s seen lose his life to the drug right in front of her. At the end of her shift, she passes by the reception at the hospital’s main entrance, too tired to offer her usual wave to the guard at the door. Arriving home, she finds Valeri and absent, wondering if he’s gone to the hall like he’d said. Exhausted, she soon falls asleep. Sidling along the streets, the working man steps gingerly around every crack in the pavement, every loosened slab of concrete left to slowly disintegrate as the seasons bring new challenges to bear, the rain, the heat, the snow and the sleet. It’s not that this latest collusion hasn’t meant anything; in fact, it’s the current example of the effort hundreds of years in the making, of the wealthy man to take from the working man and, through acts of the imagination turn what he’s taken into so much more than it is. At the union hall, in an industrial district on an island located right where the river flowing through the city separates into a delta on its way out to sea, Valeri flashes his card to get through the door. Once inside, he joins the crowd watching a man standing on the auditorium’s stage giving an impassioned speech.
“…Relentlessly attack our enemy and keep alive the spirit of the revolution fifteen years ago,” the man says, holding a little red book out as he speaks with the passion and intensity of a firebrand preacher. “…And in so keeping remember always that our enemy is still yet determined to win through, to beat us back like cattle, and to shepherd each of us to our slaughter.” These always strike Valeri as more entertainment than education, given as he is to looking on the street with the kind of forced bemusement and apathy that’s come to be altogether too common among the working men in his generation. At the union hall, things have not always been this way. At the union hall, where once there was little to be done but keep the lights on and hold the occasional, perfunctory vote, now there are men and women, Valeri’s brothers and sisters languishing in unemployment. More than a few have taken to sleeping on cots put out some years ago, with small piles of crates holding everything they own alongside.
Sometimes Valeri counts himself lucky not to be among them, to still have his little box of an apartment and his weekly pittance to subsist on, but as he stands among his brothers and sisters and listens with them to the speaker on stage, he can’t help but feel an arrogance about himself at thinking these poor souls unlucky, for their hopeless lives have not come about by accident but by deliberate campaign to make them so. “Fear not, brothers and sisters,” the man on stage with the little red book says, “for our future is won, but only so long as we diligently and faithfully apply ourselves to the task of working towards it. Read, my brothers and sisters, read and so train yourselves for the imminent arrival of the future.” The troopers never much come around here, but for their watchings of the regular demonstrations more or less leaving the working man to his misery. Men like Valeri know this means their women disappear from the streets at night, some turning up dead months or years later but most never turning up at all, as if the streets themselves swallow each woman whole.
Some argue the working man, people like Valeri’s parents only brought this on themselves, in rising fifteen years ago only prompting the wealthy man and his troopers to seal off the working man and leave him to his own devices. “It’s good to see you,” says a voice, Valeri turning to see an old friend and one-time colleague by the name of Mark Murray. He’d been among the workers at the plant, working ri
ght alongside Valeri some days, only to be selected from among their ranks to serve the union higher up. Seeing him again, for Valeri, is bittersweet, for it reminds him how little leverage they have in these trying times even as Murray comes to deliver news usually good. For Murray, you see, is the commensurate politician; he’ll meet with company officials and strike a friendly, conciliatory tone, laughing, telling jokes, shaking hands, only to, when the meetings are over and the sides separate to plot their next moves, denounce fraud, deception, lies. “And yourself,” Valeri says, shaking Murray’s hand. Keeping quiet has always felt a betrayal to Valeri. In so participating in the act, men like Murray draw boundaries, creating a safe space for themselves in which they can act out a theatre, surrendering in the wider struggle. Men like Valeri long for change, and men like Murray seem to have found their niche in demanding change. The vote is held; it’s unanimously in favour of joining the general strike. Later that night, Valeri comes home to an empty and dark apartment. With a spare piece of poster paper and a felt pen he draws up a sign and posts it to the window facing the street. The sign reads: “NO SURRENDER” It’s a small act, but one which’ll come to have great significance in the years ahead.
“…Our final victory is foretold not only by the Heavens but by the natural, inevitable course of our common history, thrumming like the beating of a common heart. But still it must be won!” The man on stage back at the union hall continues to speak, holding a clenched fist in the air to emphasize his last point. There are talks of taking part in the next general strike; this speaker is urging the whole lot of them on. It’s unsettling to a man like Valeri, someone who would prefer loneliness to a single spot of company, and amid the hushed voices and the muttered agreements he begins to feel his pulse quicken slightly and his breathing shallow a bit, forcing him to turn and make for the edge of the square. “…And we must never turn away from our destiny!”