by Peter Wild
Doing what? I asked.
Doing what you just did for me.
I started work that same evening.
The crunch of gravel below and my heart stops waxing and waning, slows back down to normal. Love that sound. Little frisson of nostalgia that harks right back to my childhood. Mum used to clean for this rich couple in this big fuck-off mansion in Derwynt with wrought-iron gates and a never-ending drive. In the school holidays she’d take me with her and I’d horse around with their teenage son while she scrubbed the shit from their toilets and ironed their linen. He’d dress me up in his boxers and Y-fronts, he’d let me take a leak with him-him on the toilet, me straddling the bidet, piss shooting off in a dozen directions.
Mac helps me out of the car. I can hear the wind moaning and sobbing across the fields, and then it’s on my face, fussing my perfect canting fringe awry, ripping the skin from the back of my neck and licking out my sweat patches. We step inside. The blindfold comes off. All the windows are shuttered in the house and, to this day, I have absolutely no idea where Mac’s house is. I get the impression, though, by the nearby lowing of cattle, the way the darkness hangs so heavy against my blindfold, that we’re deep in the country. Styal or Jodral, maybe. I go upstairs, shower–even though I showered before I left the hostel–and then I go into Mac’s bedroom. He’s lit some candles and there’s a bottle of expensive-looking red wine uncorked on the bedside cabinet with two glasses. I decant the wine into the glasses, glug greedily and replenish. I lie naked and face down on the bed with my head turned out towards the shuttered window. Mac comes in, sips on his wine and sits down on the bed beside me. He undresses and togs up and the smell of KY and rubber knifes through the air, reassuring and warm like the smell of Johnson’s when you’re a kid.
There’s no kinky shit with Mac. He likes it vanilla. Sometimes he has me dress up in small, schoolboy undies, the ones that have Superman or Spiderman flying across the crotch. Once, just once, he invited a third party. Some pretty young blonde waif with smack teeth and a posh voice. He dressed us both in white vests and blue gymslips and got us to rub up against one another like kids making out at the far end of the playing field on a balmy summer evening.
He takes longer than usual, and as he rolls off me I can smell the bitter tang of disappointment on his skin. As I’m dressing I catch sight of my curves and dimples in the wardrobe mirror, then catch sight of him watching me closely. He gives me a look that penetrates me so fully its like he’s feeling my womb, my milk ducts. It’s so final that I can’t resist feeling it, letting it burn right through me, and so final that I can’t stand feeling it. It’s over, he’s telling me. You’re no longer required. I’m shaking with hurt and sadness as I put on my clothes.
As he drops me off later that evening and presses the familiar crinkle of notes into my hand, I tell him see you next week, then, and he just smiles with half his mouth.
Goodbye, then, I say.
He won’t look at me.
I stand there in the sodium-pocked darkness, watch him right to the end of the road as he peels left and out of sight in a puff of smoke. The empty frozen street looks as stunned as I do. I stand there for a long while until the cold seizes my lungs, forcing me back to the Molly house. Forging back up the canal, I make out the diminutive figure of Rash, tearing towards me. He’s waving his arms dementedly and he’s shouting the same thing over and over, but it’s only when he gets right up close that I can make out the words behind the spume of his breath:
They found another one. Another body in the canal. There’s pigs all over the patch telling us to lay low for a few days. They’re telling us to stay clear of punters with Jags.
Behind him, snow is starting to fall.
Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours
Peter Wild
These days The Smiths are regarded as the most influential band that ever there was, but once upon a time they were a really divisive band. For everyone I knew who loved them, there were maybe ten people who would go on and on about how miserable they were. The number of arguments I sat in on, with people on one side pointing out songs like ‘Suffer Little Children’ and lyrics like ‘In a river the colour of lead/ Immerse the baby’s head’ as proof of the utter choking bleakness, while others cited songs like ‘Vicar In A Tutu’ and ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ as evidence of just how funny The Smiths could be. There were other factions, too–like the fans who dug the adolescent yearning of ‘Back To The Old House’, ‘Unloveable’ and, of course, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, or the quiff brigade, those girls and boys desperate to be Morrissey, who latched on to every cryptic utterance, reading Oscar Wilde and watching A Taste of Honey in order to…get…just…that bit closer to the man himself–but, for me, The Smiths were always at their most interesting when they became political and, occasionally, dangerous. From the aforementioned ‘Suffer Little Children’ through ‘Panic’ and ‘Shoplifters Of The World Unite’, The Smiths were never afraid to engage with the world as they saw it and they occasionally seemed to take a malicious spite in talking about stuff that people didn’t, you know, talk about. That was the attitude I wanted to incorporate in my story. Taking a song like ‘Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours’ and using it as the basis for a misguided political campaign seemed handsomely devilish.
Sorry to bother you. I was wondering if I could take up a few small moments of your time.
I’m campaigning on behalf of—
Do you mind if we—?
Lovely, lovely. Thank you.
Tea? Well, only if you’ve got a pot on. You have? Splendid. Yes. Tea would be lovely.
You have a beautiful home, if you don’t mind my saying. I particularly like what you’ve done with the—
Ah.
Thank you.
No, no sugar for me. I’m sweet enough, so they tell me.
Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssp. Wonderful.
What lovely china! It’s a family heirloom, is it? You don’t get much of that any more, do you? Family heirlooms. Great tradition, that.
Of course, our man is a great believer in tradition. Morality. Decency. Law and order. These are the cornerstones of our campaign.
Believe it or not, I used to live around here. On this very street, as a matter of fact, yes. It must be—
Thirteen years. Give or take. A long time, at any rate. I can hardly believe it myself.
Oh, it was very different when I lived here, very different. This street has changed.
Mind, the entire country has changed. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?
Thirteen years ago, you couldn’t move for credit crunch this and knife crime that, could you? Do you remember all that knife crime? Feral kids (so called) kicking law-abiding citizens to death on their own front porch. Out-of-control gangs in hoodies and scarf masks, their tracksuit trousers tucked into their socks, loitering on street corners.
All those no-go areas…
You don’t remember?
No, no, don’t worry. A lot of people have forgotten. That’s the thing, you see. Life is so much better these days. And you’re young, aren’t you? You’re young and life is good. It’s easy to forget that a relatively short time ago, life wasn’t so great. We had a prime minister—
You must remember—?
What a mess he made.
What a mess his party made.
Historically, that’s what his party always did, though. Like a bunch of schoolchildren let loose on a table filled with cream cakes. Cream cakes for everyone! But, of course, you can’t give cream cakes to everyone. There’s no budget for that. So you end up with a royal mess. You end up with a decade of royal mess.
Which is where we came in.
A landslide victory!
I remember that day as if it was yesterday. All the crowds singing Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a more-ron…as he was led away from Number 10.
Happy days.
Lovely tea, by the way.
We
rode in on a wave of unprecedented support. Sales of the Daily Mail and the Sun went through the roof. The people–the people who voted for us in their tens of thousands–were asking for draconian measures. Hard to believe now but it’s true. We want draconian measures, they told us in so many words. Thankfully, we’d had ten-plus years in the wilderness and we had a few draconian measures up our sleeves.
The previous lot said it would take years to find a solution, years to fix what they were calling a broken country.
You know why it takes years to fix a broken country, don’t you?
Four words:
Jobs for the boys.
We told the electorate we’d fix things in a year and that’s what we planned to do. We were confident. More than that, even. We were right.
We had a scheme. Three and you’re in. You haven’t heard of it? I’m not surprised. That’s the culture we live in. People have become goldfish. No offence. There were billboards the length and breadth of the country. You couldn’t move for the adverts.
Three strikes and you’re in!
There was a tagline as well:
Separating the wheat from the chav.
That was mine. It’s good, isn’t it?
You don’t know what a chav is? That just goes to show you how successful we’ve been!
The premise was brilliant: we took the idea of gated communities, islands of solace where the obscenely wealthy basked safe in the knowledge that they were among their own kind, and we flipped it: gated communities for the more undesirable elements–or not gated communities so much as gated cities, gated cities and gated towns.
Doncaster we closed off. Hull. Milton Keynes. Wigan. Bacup. Stockport. Walthamstow. There were others. We took these places off the map. Erected huge walls. To all intents and purposes, they were the same as they’d ever been. We just walled them off. Left them to it.
We equipped law enforcement with state-of-the-art biometrics, handheld PDAs.
We drew up lists of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. I say we drew up lists. We’d had the lists for the better part of a half-century.
Sorry?
What do I mean by unacceptable behaviour?
…
It’s funny. Thirteen years ago you would’ve known exactly what I meant by unacceptable behaviour. It just goes to show you…
As far as we were concerned, unacceptable behaviour covered any and all acts of petty crime. By which I mean, small-scale drug dealing, vandalism, threatening behaviour, the carrying of a concealed weapon. However, we consulted with focus groups throughout the country and, as a result, the list grew and grew. It got so playing music on your phone too loud was considered unacceptable behaviour. Truancy–unacceptable behaviour. Undue aggression in your tone of voice. Obesity. Casual racism. Ignorance. Unacceptable behaviour.
If the powers that be witnessed what we deemed unacceptable behaviour, you were given a strike, your thumbprint recorded by the police, your information stored centrally on a beautiful supercomputer the size of a Fry’s Turkish Delight.
If you received three strikes, you were relocated, instantaneously, without recourse to the legal system. We gave the police their powers back. You had three strikes, you were gone. Decent society wanted nothing to do with you.
It does sound harsh, you’re right–but you have to remember, these are people who were laughing at the judicial system. Prison was a holiday. More than that, even. Prison was a badge of honour.
There was an 0800 number too. You could report unacceptable behaviour. You could text. Our voters really liked that. Created so many jobs. Call centres and the like. Not that we accepted what people had to say, of course. We had a furiously complicated software system that cross-referenced who you were against everything we knew about you. If you had a criminal record, if you didn’t pay your council tax on time, if you earned below a certain amount, we didn’t take you seriously. At the same time, however, frequently, a nexus was established–lots of people reporting the same problem. In those instances, we applied a sort of cumulative corroboration. Not so much you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent as you’re guilty. Full stop.
Of course, there were riots–at first. Dublin, Dundee–I’m sure you remember the rest.
The PC brigade had a real feather in its cap. All those think tanks, the Fabian Society, Amnesty International. We told them straight: we thought it partly their fault the country had wound up in the state that it was in. Always bloody apologising for the people we’d let down.
Everyone has a choice, I think.
You can decide to be good. You can decide to be bad. You can decide to do your best or you can decide that life will never be fair and react accordingly.
We cleared these towns so that they were empty. We walled them off. Then we repopulated them with ne’er-do-wells.
What struck me at the time was, when we cleared the gated towns and cities, there were large numbers of people who refused to leave. Gated, ungated, it was all one to them. They wanted to stay where they knew what was what.
Now, looking back, it would’ve been easier to relocate the desirable elements, but you live and you learn.
…
It was never going to proceed without controversy, though, was it? Revolutionary ideas never do. We anticipated the guerrilla film crews and the shocking documentaries that promised to spill the beans on life behind the wall.
Life was brutal in the gated communities.
Why would that shock anyone?
Our rationale was—
These people have urges: the urge to steal, the urge to cheat, the urge to fight and stab and, yes, kill. Behind the wall, they were free to do just as they pleased. If they were going to kill (and steal and cheat and fight and stab), how much better it was that they killed and stole from and cheated and fought and stabbed each other.
When people saw we were serious, when people saw that the relocations were final, irrevocable–three strikes and you were in, end of–antisocial behaviour disappeared.
We didn’t see a reduction. It disappeared.
Society changed, overnight.
There were rumbles, of course, rumbles at home and abroad. But there are always rumbles. And when other countries saw the amount we were saving on community policing—
Well, it wasn’t long before gated communities sprang up pretty much everywhere.
I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a top-up, could I? You really do make a wonderful cup of tea.
…
Are these your children? They’re beautiful. Where was that taken? Lanzarote, eh? I’ve never been there. Yes, yes, I’ve heard it has a bad reputation. But it’s nice, you say?
I have three children myself.
I say children; they’re all grown up now. But they’re always children, aren’t they? However old they get.
Time fair marches on, doesn’t it?
Oh. Thanks.
Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssspp. Mmh. Lovely.
Time fair marches on and now, of course, there are people–people like your good self–who have forgotten the gated communities even exist.
No, don’t apologise, I think it’s a good thing. I’m glad you don’t remember what the world was like before. I’m glad you have no idea what a chav is.
Of course, there are people who never forget. They’re the ones we’re up against now. There are people who think all the walls have to come down.
A flagrant abuse of human rights…
…
I know what you’re going to say. I can tell from the expression on your face. We’ve had our three terms in office. Isn’t it time we gave the other fellows a crack of the whip? A change is as good as a rest…
I’m not saying it’s been perfect. We’ve had issues, as a government. All the sleaze. With us, it’s always sleaze. It’s what comes of public school boys, largely, getting what they want. And, I agree, we’re very definitely past our sell-by date, in some respects.
But it was precisely that–
that sense of our time coming to an end, that intuition that whoever comes next might overturn a lot of the genuinely good work we’ve done–that has led to my being here today.
We’ve had an idea, you see.
As far as those gated communities are concerned, quite possibly their time has come and gone. They were a good idea while they lasted but now the world has moved on.
OK.
Fine.
But the last thing that we want is to release all of those undesirable elements–undesirable elements, I should add, who have had a good long time to get worked up. If they were undesirable elements before, imagine how undesirable they’re likely to be now…
So. What we’re asking voters is this: give us one more chance. Let us fix this problem once and for all. I won’t go overboard on the details of the plan. All that you really need to know is that we have a solution and it’s pretty damn final.
What we’re asking is this:
Come next Thursday.
When you find yourself alone in the voting cubicle.
With your pen hovering over the piece of paper.
As you weigh up the choices available to you.
Vote for us.
Just this one last time, if need be.
We’ll make sure that this land of ours stays great.
You have my word on that.
Jeane
James Hopkin
I latched on to The Smiths around the time of the Meat Is Murder album and, like so many bored and bony adolescents, I became a fanatic: well-gelled quiff, old suit jacket from Affleck’s Palace on Tib Street, and dancing on one leg in the Hacienda, or Morrissey’s former haunts such as Deville’s. In fact, it was there I first heard ‘Jeane’, not even realising it was The Smiths, because I didn’t have the right version of ‘This Charming Man’ and the production sounded so flat (though that is part of its appeal). ‘Jeane’ reminds me of Deville’s: the sticky carpets, the dance floor not much bigger than a boxing ring, and then all these Morrissey clones–even the girls. As an honorary Manc, having moved to Manchester aged nine, The Smiths meant so much because the lyrics forever preyed upon the theme of belonging/not belonging and, er, longing. My devotion was rewarded when, at the age of nineteen and at Manchester airport, I was astonished to see a tall, immaculate rockabilly bouffant coming out of customs with my parents, whom I’d gone to collect. It turns out they had travelled back on the same flight from Florida, where the estranged Mozz had been recording the video for ‘Suedehead’. I grabbed a pile of paper from a travel desk and rushed for autographs. He was witty and courteous and I accompanied him to a black cab outside. When the cab pulled away, I turned and saw an old school friend waiting at the bus stop. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘Was that Morrissey?’