by J. T. Marsh
3. A Divergent Verse
A knock on the door. “You didn’t get caught up in any of that business, did you?” asks Valeri’s landlord, a much older man named Graham with trouble standing up straight and spots all over his skin from aging. “Not yet,” Valeri replies. Graham had come of age in a more liberal time, when drugs were seen as bold experiments rather than the scourge of the working man’s streets we know them as today. “You’ve always you’re your rent on time,” Graham says, “I don’t want you getting mixed up in that kind of stuff and making me have to find someone else to pay rent on your suite. God knows it’s hard enough to find a decent tenant these days.” “I’ll be careful,” Valeri says. “Who’s that girl you’ve been bringing home?” Graham asks. “A friend,” Valeri says. “This isn’t a whore house,” Graham says, then quickly adds, “anymore.” Valeri, without skipping a beat, says, “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” then politely closes the door and returns to his reading. Graham was born abroad and spent his youth in the drug-addled counter-culture movement that’d seized a whole generation. Fleeing a drunken father who beat him whenever on the drink, he came to see his own salvation in the warmed-over haze of his drugs. After getting caught up in a police raid on a drug den and later arrested at some demonstration against the then-current war raging abroad he fell into a deep depression. After losing many years to his fight with the insidious illness, he moved from the States and tried to escape what he’d been through. He might’ve succeeded, if only he could’ve forgotten the things he’d seen growing up in times almost as radical as the times we live in today. Beaten, humiliated, thrown in prison for want of a relief, he scraped together the wherewithal to survive on what little money he could make. Through it all, Graham had filled his life with prostitutes and addicts and common criminals, each in his life just long enough to take what they wanted from him, leaving him bitter. But Graham won’t have long to wait until the war that’s in the offing explodes on these very streets once more.
At the shop, things are different. “You always were the quiet one,” says a man named Ruslan Kuznetsov, one of Valeri’s fellow workers at the shop. “It doesn’t concern you what I do,” Valeri replies. Ruslan always was one of those workers who likes to try and play manager’s favourite, tattling on the other workers over the most trivial of offences. Part of Ruslan likes to think he’s earning himself a position as a middle manager by currying favour with them, while another part of him simply revels in reporting on the other workers’ misdeeds, however trivial or harmless. But the better part of Ruslan honestly believes. When a new policy decision comes down, Ruslan not only embraces it but brings himself to honestly believe in it. He’s a complex figure, more complex than he likes to let on, and in troubled times it’s exactly this complexity that’ll ultimately doom him to the same fate as all the others. For now, though, he reduces himself to a managerial sycophant to inoculate himself against the possibility of losing his job and thus the pittance that keeps him barely alive.
Still it bothers Valeri when Graham intrudes like that; as a private person, Valeri doesn’t like questions, even questions neither intrusive nor inappropriate. “You never have any women over,” Graham said once, and it struck Valeri as a pointed question, implying an accusation of homosexuality. But when Valeri had Sydney over, once or twice, he’d thought it, then, something to be concealed should his personal life become exposed, in some small way, to people like Graham or the little old lady across the hall. “In a hurry?” Sydney had asked him once as he led her through the halls and up the stairwell, with Valeri only replying with a half-knowing wink. On this day, as Valeri mulls over his landlord’s latest interjection in the back of his mind, he can’t know but could likely divine the landlord’s role as only an apparatchik of sorts, there to carry out the absentee owner’s will in exchange for his own personal pittance. In his own way, Graham had continued to suffer all those years in silence, tortured not by the beatings or by the transient relationships that’d characterized every period of his life, but by the loneliness in being made to feel as though there was something wrong with him.
At the shop, Valeri and Ruslan are still at it. “Why aren’t you working harder?” asks Ruslan. “I’m working as hard as I can,” says Valeri. “What’s wrong with you today?” asks Ruslan. “Nothing’s wrong with me,” says Valeri, “it’s just hard for me here.” A pause. Ruslan shifts his stance slightly. For a moment it seems he might offer sympathy to Valeri. But it’s not to be. “What’s come over you today?” asks Ruslan. “Today?” Valeri asks, “I’ll tell you what’s come over me today. Just look at this place. We work ourselves tired and all we get besides this pathetic wage is heaps of abuse and intimidation. Even you! You run yourself ragged but you never make enough to do anything more than keep yourself alive.” It’s not the first time he’s let out some pent-up anger, and it won’t be the last. Soon enough Valeri will learn to see him for the frightened man he is, though by the time this personal enlightenment occurs to Valeri it’ll be far too late for any of them to extend much empathy for one another. This particular run-in, though, is but the latest in a string of run-ins between them breeding resentment and mutual distrust.
By the time war broke out in the streets fifteen years ago, Graham was already too old and too enfeebled to take part in the way Valeri’s parents had. Consigned to the sidelines he watched as the younger generation lashed out at the wealthy man’s oppression, every now and then pausing to mutter to himself, “it’s all happening again.” As the crowds of people like Valeri’s parents seized the streets, it seemed to Graham and all the other survivors of a lost generation that, for a moment, this war might see them succeed. Managing to pull himself out of his depression, he found his way into the streets just in time to see it all come crashing down. But all Valeri or anyone else can see in him is a gruff and bitter old man. After sleeping through most of the day, Hannah rises and spots Valeri on his way out the door, thinking to call out to him but choosing against it. Instead, she turns to her own affairs in the few hours until she must return to the A&E. “You don’t understand,” she says to her mother, a thousand kilometres apart and linked only by the screen in each woman’s hand. “If anything happens I’ve got lots of friends here I can take in with. Besides, I’m too overworked at the hospital to get caught up in all the street fighting.” But her mother isn’t so easily reassured. In any case, both know there’s nowhere for her to go, the burden of her wages keeping her stuck in place; with simmering tensions and life stagnant in working class districts of major cities and small towns across the country, anyplace she could go would see her in much the same danger. After the war fifteen years ago, Hannah’s mother, like all mothers, worries on the safety of her daughter living in the city. After seeing ordinary workers cut down in the streets of Britain’s cities and towns, her mother worries Hannah might be caught up in the next war. But she doesn’t know her daughter has come of age in a time of bombs exploding and gunfire rattling in the street; to Hannah, this is simply background noise. Only too late will Hannah realize events about to occur aren’t the new normal, that all our lives will be so radically changed.
After a long and hard day, a punch at the clock releases the working man to tend to his own affairs; his family, scattered across the country with even one or two halfway around the world. In his is a way of solitude, coming home to an empty little box of an apartment sitting amid a hundred other empty little boxes, each hundred little boxes built, once upon a time, to make a way of life for millions. Among his ranks live elderly widowers left to subsist on fixed incomes, single mothers, addicts and prostitutes, yet also families, children, couples who’ve lived here all their lives and others who’ve only just arrived. As fires burn half a world away the working man clenches his fist reflexively and sleeps through the night, tossing and turning all the while, imagining in his dreams a personal vengeance against an impersonal force, a struggle against the forces of nature that’s closer to paying off than you might think. The
wealthy man would have the working man believe that this is the envy of the world, that this little cube of air held three stories up off the street, filled with second-hand furniture and cigarette butts and cockroaches hiding in the cracks in the kitchen walls, when the working man comes home in the evening and flips on the lights the whole swarm of them scurrying for cover. Messages bombard the working man through the airwaves and through the data line, messages proclaiming the endless abundance in this day and age, messages declaring skyrocketing prices to be a sure sign of progress even as the working man has cut back on eating meat for the cost of it all. This, as explosions and intermittent gunfire tear holes in the silence of the not-infrequent night-time power outages that plunge London’s working-class districts into total darkness.
It matters little, I suppose, that half of us all can’t afford the essentials of life, that half of us all wear clothes three or four wearers from the factory and with little rips and holes in the seams strategically hidden so as not to give away the our shame. It’s all an elaborate fraud, and it’s always been an elaborate fraud, a fraud perpetuated against the self, eagerly so. But not much longer. When the working man works his way through another day, he stamps across the same, familiar ground, the soles of his boots brought down into the same holes made from the same stamps of boots a thousand and one times before, this time, though, his boots falling a hair’s width aside, in some small act of defiance the working man staking out a spot in his own mind for they who would seek a better way of life to claim. After Hannah arrives to work her next shift at the hospital, there happens the one thing she would’ve never expected: an empty bed in the A&E. It’s empty only for a brief time, perhaps a half-hour or two, then filled with another poor young man dying a quick but painful death. Still, Hannah wonders if this is to be an isolated case, or a regular occurrence, as she takes up her station and looks over the master chart on the wall of all patients, a storm of red and blue streaks and smudges loosely arranged into words on a whiteboard. “Another long night?” asks another nurse, a younger woman named Whitney. “It’s not long if you do it every day,” says Hannah, eying the coffee machine in the corner. Short-staffed and overworked, this is the life they chose, even as young men wearing suits and ties speed along the streets in sports cars outside. In the night, they’ll lose a patient, a young man who’s been dying for some weeks now. He’ll die not of an incurable disease or some traumatic injury but for want of a medicine kept in short supply by the company that holds the rights to it. This, as the hospital’s power fails intermittently, plunging the A&E into darkness for only a moment before diesel generators kick in. But nobody flinches, neither at the death nor the darkness, carrying on.
“Nothing is certain,” said the man standing in front of Victory Monument that day, “even as it is inevitable!” Still Valeri doesn’t quite know what that means, even as he swears to himself that he does. “Don’t love me,” Sydney had said once, in a way that’d seemed, then, to be less melodramatic than it seems, now, as Valeri recalls the look in her eye as she’d said it. As he falls asleep this night with the little red book falling gently onto his chest, the last thing he recalls is the image of his mother and father, standing over him as he kneels at their grave, looking down on him, his father turning and saying to his mother, “it’s almost his time.” Astride a wave of enthusiasm and atop a mountain of riches and power built up beneath him over hundreds of years, the wealthy man looks across the urban sprawl and sees nothing but opportunity laid before him, opportunity reaching for the horizon and beyond. The wealthy man wears his suit and tie which cost more than the working man earns in a year’s wages. The wealthy man cruises the public streets in his armoured cars with blackened windows and with a paid driver who sympathizes not with his master but with the men who live outside his master’s safe and sequestered in a little bubble. Astride a wave of enthusiasm the wealthy man can hardly contain his exuberance, leaping whenever a string of numbers scroll across his screen, the odd red mark drowning in a sea of green. In truth, every green mark signifies the loss of a hundred livelihoods and the thinning out of a hundred more. It’s been this way for a long time, for as long as anyone can remember. But it needn’t be this way much longer. As I lead you through the beginning of the end, we take stock of all sins, so that we may settle accounts when the time is right, not with pounds but with blood. This is a messy business, ugly and vulgar, as it’s always been and should always be. In the night, we seek solace in the certainty that the dawn shall always come.
But then, sometime in the future, there should inevitably come the morning which sees no dawn, where the darkness lingers into the day as if we’ll all be living in a permanent night. In the A&E this night it’s another wave of admissions from the streets, Hannah keeping up but only barely, fourteen hours of tending to overdoses, failed suicides, and breakdowns leaving her with pain behind her eyes and strain in her muscles, worst of all a lump in her stomach. Arriving home to find Valeri already asleep, she walks into their shared bedroom and without taking off her scrubs she collapses into bed, asleep herself before hitting the sheets. “Well, what came of it?” Whitney had asked, two-thirds through their shift. She’d been speaking of the invite Valeri had given her to come to the hall, a thread they’d talked about between drawing blood from one man and injecting a sedative into another. “I have no time to get involved with the rabble,” she’d said. At that moment, for only a moment, the hospital’s power cut out, the lights falling dark and alarms sounding for a brief period before generators kick in. “Well, thank God somebody does,” said Whitney. When Hannah wakes up in the evening, she has the apartment to herself, and at once thinks of her own promise, not to her distant mother but to herself, the promise not to lose herself in the romantic radicalism of youth. Now in her thirties, she feels much older than she is, the temptation towards romance seeming to grow with each year that passes, through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia for youth the radicalism seeming much more romantic than she knows it to be.
In the night, the city comes alive, brimming with a restless energy that seems to emanate from every open window and from every darkened alley. The working class apartment blocks sit spaced close enough for residents to link hands and form a human chain dangling from building to building like power lines. Loose debris litters the sidewalk, swept aside by the overworked crews that run through this place perhaps once a week, at best. Cigarette butts are found scattered everywhere but the ashtrays left out by the city for the working man’s use. Used syringes line the gutters. Blood splotches hide in the trash. This, we would be led to believe, this is the envy of the rest of the world, this is the ideal all aspire to. Left to fester, the looming spectre of so much pent up despair, frustration, resentment can but slowly take shape, its form rising from the formless. We are locked in with our own sort of people, confined into a steadily shrinking space until our space can be shrunk no more; then, still it will be made to shrink. Still in the night you can see the spaces where working people used to work; the ghostly outlines of their figures reaching into the sky, astride a boxed-in feeling more powerful than the highest of drug-induced highs. It’s foolish to wonder what might’ve been, but never is it so foolish to imagine what might yet be. In this spirit, the working man sometimes spares a thought for all that he would’ve been working for all his life had but the force of law not subordinated him to his master. His would’ve counted history’s greatest achievements, the weight of the greatest victories, the tallest towers, the longest spans and the widest roads all made by the hands of the working man. But it’s the littlest achievements, too, the modest house built in the countryside, the carefully-sculpted garden tended in the narrow space on an apartment’s balcony, the small potholes filed in on the highway that make up the working man’s proudest achievements, those mundane acts that make day-to-day life possible.
But not all hope is lost in these quarters, a vitality sharing the same time and space as despair. No matter how much is taken from him, the wor
king man will always have his soul, the essence of his self, that lingering sense of identity lying at the core of his being. But all this is lost in the hurried, frenetic, disjointed day-to-day struggle for sustenance. The working man feels the soreness in his muscles and the tightness in his back, but he’s lucky just to feel, so many of his own dying in the night. Down the hall, a retired lady lives out the last of her days, emerging to let in the nurse who comes to bathe her once a week. Down another hall there’s an apartment where, not all that long ago, an elderly man died in his sleep, only to be left for days, discovered when the stench of rotting flesh became too rancid and overpowering to be ignored any longer.
Already there are those who would deign to fight the way of things; but they are the few, the proud, the many lost in a sea of even more, in the night a burst of gunfire rattling off somewhere in that maze of densely-packed apartment blocks, in the morning a concrete wall riddled with bullet holes standing a macabre backdrop for the children who walk to school along those very streets and step over the weeds sprouting from between cracks in the sidewalk’s concrete slabs. Spent shell casings sit in the gutter and splotches of crimson dry out slowly on the road, their colour hardly noticeable against the oil stains dotting the asphalt. ‘NO SURRENDER’ scrawls across a wall behind a dumpster, scrawled not in the night that’s just passed but some months, perhaps years earlier and left to slowly fade in the harsh glare of the summer’s sun. It matters little what’s happened in the night. It’ll matter someday soon, but not yet. This, now, is the current expression of our state of war, of the undeclared war we’ve been fighting for so long as any of us have been. It’s a crime, that some old man should suffer the indignity of dying alone, in his little box of an apartment, and then in death to be subjected to the continued indignity of being left to rot like human trash, only disposed of when his odour grew too noxious and disgusting to be ignored. It’s a criminal act that goes unpunished, for now, but not forgotten, even if this one man’s indignity might become lost the indignities of the thousands nevertheless searing a permanent mark on the consciousness of the working man.