by Kim Newman
Draper has found you in the garden, enjoying the dusk. You have locked up the Batcave.
‘What brings you out this way?’ you ask.
Draper nods towards Achelzoy.
‘Roy Canning and the travellers?’ you hazard.
‘You must be psychic, Keith.’
‘Not really. It’s all anybody talks about round here these days. Roy was over yesterday. I suppose you’re following up on his complaint.’
‘Which one?’
‘The latest.’
‘It’s gone a bit beyond complaints. Canning’s apparently been playing silly buggers. Fancies himself as a commando.’
Mary looks concerned.
‘He’s not in any trouble, is he? Yesterday, he was wound up tight. Making all kinds of accusations and threats.’
‘He must have accomplices.’
‘Has Eastment called you in?’ you ask Draper. ‘That’s a turn-up. A hippie calling the “pigs”?’
Draper snorts. ‘Eastment’s in hospital.’
‘Sounds like a range war,’ you comment, ironically. ‘Wild West stuff.’
‘I’m sick of being Sheriff in this town,’ Draper says.
Mary hugs him. ‘Don’t worry. We love you. Would you like a jar of the tomato goo?’
Sunday evening. After Draper has gone, without knowing why, you both can’t stop giggling.
As it gets dark, you don’t turn on the lights in the house. You and Mary sit on your sofa in your lounge, holding each other, as much a couple as the day you were married. The shadows grow inside, seeping across the floor and up the walls, boxing in the last squares of light and cutting them down to slivers then wiping them out.
You will always be a team.
You and Mary. And the dark.
And so on.
Begin again?
81
You pause in the shade, which suddenly seems bristling with threat, and look back. Will comes to the door, leading Mary. Her hair is undone and she is buttoning a cardigan. Mildly impatient, she looks out of the door but doesn’t see you. You press yourself into the shrinking dark.
She looks around, humouring her son. Clearly, she doesn’t believe in the man who came to the door. She can’t have heard your knock.
She takes Will inside, and shuts the door.
You straighten and step out of the shade. For the first time, you’re unsure of yourself. This is way off your patch. People dressed like you do not wander around this estate and expect to walk away with their watches and credit cards.
Until now, you thought of yourself as a predator. Now you are a victim.
Older kids, who should be in school, cluster behind a windbreak garage wall, lighting up cigarettes. People are all around, going to work.
The night is almost gone.
You wander away, without purpose. It is as if the day has been called off and you are free. You have no appointments, no commitments.
The last thing that seems clear in your mind is something absurd, trivial and long-gone. The seatbelt in Mary’s dad’s car, and the trouble you had with it.
That would be 197when? Rag Day?
Jubilee year. 1977.
The day you went to Sutton Mallet.
Later that morning, you drive out to Sutton Mallet. The turn-off is still there. The road is paved now. There are a few more houses, new homes for commuters.
You park the car and get out.
It’s cold, but clear. You feel nothing. There’s nothing unexceptional or strange about this place.
Is this what made you run?
You find the field. The one where you ran, where you were chased. It’s just a field, grass crisp where the frost has not gone.
You shout at the shadow-spiders. ‘Come out, come and get me.’
Nothing.
For the first time, you feel free. You thought you might be afraid, but you aren’t. You almost feel excited.
There are things you want to change. Things you want to get out of, patterns you want to break.
Fear will come, you know. But so will other things.
You can do anything. The future is yours, to make of what you will.
You walk away from Sutton Mallet.
And so on.
Begin again?
82
These are not dreams. These things really happen.
But one misstep, and you lose everything.
You and Ro become explorers, of your own love. You stay in the house in Sutton Mallet, on the mattress surrounded by candles, and you make love. With infinite variety, you explore the possibilities of expressing feelings through flesh. You become parts of each other, always striving to make the whole function better as a manifestation of your shared pleasure. You grow together.
You don’t need food, clothes, jobs, educations.
The moment extends, for ever.
You don’t age or tire or have children or change your minds.
Your bodies are impressed with the rhythms of your movements. You tick over, sometimes exploding into frenzied writhings, sometimes lapping gently.
Eternally, you hear the song of the flesh.
You and Ro become pirates, really you do. You convert a luxury yacht into an assault craft and prey on those evil-doers who use international waters to avoid justice. You rescue slaves, defy drug-smugglers, persecute polluting industrialists, intercept fleeing deposed dictators. You fly the Jolly Roger. Rowena is, literally, your First Mate.
You accumulate, spend and bury treasure. You make love on tropical beaches at sundown. You duel with villains and always win. You evade the authorities with style.
Eternally, you hear the song of the sea.
You and Ro become explorers, of your love. You stay in the house in Sutton Mallet, and find your communion has become general, has opened up a channel to the divine. You worship through each other. You begin to understand, to map the hidden workings of the universe. You each become part of the whole, never surrendering your selves but opening up to the myriad others. You evolve together.
You don’t need.
The moment extends, for ever.
You age, tire, have children, change your minds.
Others join you, venerate you both for your insights, revere you for your humility. You refuse to be set upon pedestals and find joy in working the fields as much as in roaming the universe.
Eternally, you hear the song of the soul.
You and Ro go to university, get jobs, get married, have children, grow old and die.
At each stage, your life is perfect.
You are as content as parents as you are as lovers, as colleagues, as grandparents.
You are unobtrusive, so people don’t envy you. And yet you are loved beyond the circle of your immediate family.
Eternally, you hear the song of the world.
Go to 99.
83
You’re amazed Sean has got away with it. He has founded a financial empire, diversifying into paper companies notionally owned by Ro, almost entirely on monies ‘borrowed’ from the bank. He has approved loans — which is supposed to be your job — to Ro at extremely favourable terms. He’s paying the loans back and you work out he’ll leave the bank just as he gets square. He’ll have a clear profit, acquired through — in effect — gambling with the bank’s customers’ money. He’s not an idiot, though. If left alone, he’ll be out of it and nobody any the wiser. No one will care about a loan paid back promptly. He’s broken the law, but hasn’t actually stolen anything.
Then, on some flimsies, you find your signature. It’s not even a forgery. It’s just your name, written by someone else.
Not Sean. You know his handwriting. Ro? Maybe. Are you culpable? No, you’re a victim.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ Candy asks.
And you’re a chump. Sean has been laughing at you.
‘Could you get me some tea, dear.’
‘Yes, Keith.’
You look over HOUSEKEEPING again. There’s no doubt. Sean
has been a party to fraud, and instituted a policy of embezzlement. Dad would have been heart-broken.
If you report Sean to the police, go to 114. If you put the file away and try to forget all about it, go to 125. If you go to Sean to talk about it, go to 135.
84
If you think about this, you won’t do it. You’re just playing with the idea. You don’t mean it.
You’re blowing it up.
You open the cabinet, expecting to see a gaping dark void beyond the mirror. Instead, there are shelves. The medicine half of the cabinet: sticking plasters, bandages, insect-bite ointment, aspirin, Mum’s sleeping pills, indigestion tablets, milk of magnesia, haemorrhoid ointment. The toiletries half: scented soap, shampoo, Dad’s razor-blades, fresh flannel, toothpaste, bubble bath.
How to do it?
You’re here. You will do it. No going back now.
Ro will be sorry. She’ll understand.
It’s the only way you can show how you really feel.
You aren’t a heartless bastard. You feel things deeply. Too deeply.
The bathroom, as well-lit as a lunatic’s high-security cell, is full of shadows. They press in around you.
They aren’t unfriendly. They are here to make it easy.
You reach into the cabinet.
If you take the pills, go to 90. If you take the razor-blade, go to 95.
85
The Scam collapses in 1991, owing a lot of people — including you — a lot of money. There’s a great deal of acrimony in the collective. You find yourself in a tiny splinter faction, supporting Anne. She travels into nervous-breakdown country. No amount of restructuring or refinancing helps. Debt sinks the dream.
You work as a researcher for independent television, doing a stint as a fact-finder for Survival Kit, a street-level consumer programme. You still freelance for The Guardian and the Statesman. You self-publish pamphlets.
You write exposés of the privatisation program, showing just how fat cats benefit from the selling-off of public utilities. Your thesis is that the Tory government enthusiastically embraces the Marxist notion of redistribution of wealth, but chooses to redistribute upwards from the broad base of the poor. The few become enormously rich at the expense of the many. You win an award for your investigative work and a token MP has to resign. Nevertheless, privatisation continues like a juggernaut.
You’re one of the first to refer in print to the Community Charge as a ‘poll tax’. It is still brought in. You refuse to pay yours. You go on marches. You take photographs at a big demo that turns into a riot as police and anarchist groups spoil for a fight in Trafalgar Square. You write about what it’s like being on the receiving end of a cavalry charge.
Margaret Thatcher falls from power but John Major wins the next election. All things considered, you hate him more. She was Medusa-come-Hitler, he’s a bureaucrat with an independent nuclear deterrent.
After the death of John Smith and the rise of Tony Blair, you fume at the Labour Party’s abandonment of socialism. You hate Blair more than Major. After all, Major wasn’t supposed to be on your side. In a whirl of PR and glitz and spin-doctoring and focus groups and public-school hangers-on, New Labour conceals its acceptance of the baton of authoritarianism. The people are cut out of the system.
Democracy has obviously failed. You consider non-electoral activities.
Clare and her girlfriend Maisie get their indie record label together, trading on a resurgence of interest in the bubblegum pop they stayed faithful to all these years. Indirectly, they are responsible for the Spice Girls. You feel the need to join a travellers’ convoy.
Your group is harassed by the police, lackeys of the entrenched interests who want to deny you access to the common land of England. Rumours go round that the army will be sent after you. Remembering James, you do your best to organise a militia in the convoy. You work out an early-warning system alerting you to hostile approaches and try to get the more able men and women together as a defence force.
Your fellow travellers find this a bit heavy and don’t respond well to the imposition of discipline. A woman called Syreeta condemns you for reverting to patriarchalism and you are expelled.
You are a collective of one.
Why don’t others notice they are being ruled by Evil? Why don’t your fellow victims respond to your wake-up calls, your attempts to get a resistance together?
You can’t work in television any longer. There are too many controlling interests. In the end, the media is wholly owned by monsters like Rupert Murdoch or — your new bête noire — Derek Leech. Demon demagogues atop their monolithic corporations are systematically destroying oppositional access to air-time.
But new media develop. A lightweight camcorder allows you to take moving snapshots of the underside of the glorious new society. The Internet lets you get round octopus tentacles of oppression to tell some of the truth. You no longer care about your own voice, you just want to get through to people.
You still follow the links between top politicians — New Labour as much as Old Tory — and big business, observing the way the law of the land is restructured or ignored to the benefit of the powerful. You become increasingly concerned with cultural issues, with the way a thinking, feeling society is being polluted by an invasion of heartless, bread-and-circuses trash.
No publisher is willing to take Keeping Tabs, the book you write about the pernicious influence of Murdoch’s Sun and Leech’s Comet. The takeover is complete. The rebels have been rounded up, bought off, disappeared, seduced to the Dark Side of the Force or ridiculed out of the game. It is as if giant spiders from outer space have taken over the world, and now expect to be worshipped for sucking the life out of billions of souls.
You follow the way the media are spreading thin. More and more TV channels fill with less and less content. Soaps and quizzes and porn fill the frequencies, flooding out towards Alpha Centauri, an expanding sphere of mindwashing drivel filling the universe, a poisonous gift for other civilisations. TV and cable and satellite bosses talk about increased choice and the information revolution, but all they deliver is sex and violence and shopping.
Worst of all is the frenzy of greed, hopelessness and tack that surrounds the National Lottery. From the first you hear of it, you are the implacable enemy of this tax on hope, on stupidity, on futility. It’s an aesthetic and a moral atrocity, dangling the promise of unimaginable wealth before demoralised and desensitised masses. Tony Blair calls it ‘the People’s Lottery’, which makes you furious. It’s not something for the people, it’s something done to them. With deliberate malice and deep-seated evil intent.
You make a documentary about impoverished persistent Lottery players, Losers. No television station will take it. They claim problems with securing clips rights to National Lottery Live from the BBC, and cite the low technical standard of your interview footage. You know you’ve been silenced. You transcribe Losers and post it on your web page. You get a lot of hits but are mail-bombed with criticism. You recognise an orchestrated campaign.
The Lottery has become the engine of oppression. It sucks in huge amounts, which remain unaccounted-for, and distracts the slaves. It keeps the Tories in power far beyond their sell-by date, and makes sure the New Labour government is business as usual for the vampire filth who really run the country.
It poisons all it touches.
You make a follow-up documentary, Winners. Case histories of Lottery millionaires are, if anything, sadder than those of the losers. Ordinary people, sold a dream, learn how worthless money really is. You despair at the lack of imagination the winners show. Quite apart from broken families, death threats, descents into addiction or madness and the high suicide rate, the winners are blighted by a poverty of mind that has been deliberately inculcated in them and which no amount of money will ever relieve.
If you had a million pounds, you’d make it work. You’d go on the attack.
You’re arrested for harassment of big winners and the new law on
stalking — rushed through parliament in Blair’s first month in office — mean you get six months’ jail time. The zombie press refers to you as a ‘dangerous obsessive’ with an ‘unhealthy fixation’ on Lottery winners. You are tagged as ‘the Lottery Stalker’. You state your case clearly whenever you’re caught by the media, but are always edited to seem like Lee Harvey Oswald. Of course, he was innocent too.
Released from jail, you’re required to have counselling. You’re not disturbed. You calmly state your position. In group therapy, you’re abused by genuine neurotics. Mad people all play the Lottery, it turns out. Why aren’t you surprised?
You open files on the presenters, past and present. Anthea Turner, Dale Winton, Bob Monkhouse, Carol Smillie. Teeth agleam in studio lights, they are obviously part of the problem. They are the spangled attendants of the people-grinding machines, high priests and priestesses of the sacrifice. Each week, twice, the wheels spin, the numbers come up, and countless bloody, beating hearts are ripped out of chests, displayed with a smile for the cameras. And Mystic Meg. If she’s really clairvoyant, why can’t she see you coming?
One day, the black ball will come up.
On the Internet, you learn about home-made explosives. You compare and contrast the Oklahoma City bomb with the World Trade Center bomb. You go back over all your IRA coverage and dig as far back as the French Resistance. You’re amazed at how easy it is if you just work hard. A combination of DIY and cookery, and a little expensive quarry pilferage, should do the trick.
You always watch the Lottery on Saturday and the new mid-week draw on Wednesday. You have to keep tabs on the enemy.