“Where are the other bearers?” asks Jordison.
“They didn’t come back,” says James. He considers the wounded men on the floor of the trench and their imploring, tear-streaked faces. Six more.
“We should take a man each, on our backs,” says James.
“What about the other four?” asks Jordison.
“We should kill them before the fire does,” says James.
The yeoman grabs James by the collar.
“You made me come,” he shouts. “And I did not come to kill!”
Acrid black smoke rolls down over the lip of the trench. The stretcher bearers cannot hear one another for the fearful cries around them. Jordison hefts a crying lad up onto his knee, turns and lifts the wounded man onto his shoulders. Sorry, he whispers to the remaining men. I am so sorry. James takes a lungful of scorched air, ducks down, and hauls up the first wounded man to hand. He is too heavy on his back and he stumbles into the side of the trench, feels the muscles in his arms and his back give; he has no strength left. All at once, something has gone from his legs. Overhead, fire arches over the top of the trench, burning the oxygen from the air. The wounded man clambers over him, knee in his face, boot scraping his chin, then collapses. The side of the trench slides in, half-covering his face with dirt. If he does not move now, then he is going to be buried then burned alive. It is an underwater kind of panic, desperation to take a breath but with the water’s surface still a kick or two away. He is up on his feet again and he stumbles away, leaving the wounded man behind. Forgive me, forgive me. Ammunition explodes in a flurry of bangs and sparks, like the rookies on Eviction Night. The pitiful yowls and mother-cries of the burning men. He stumbles along the trench, greatcoat over his head, stopping here and there to check for a break in the fire.
“Here!”
Jordison has come back for him. He holds his hands out to the yeoman. Jordison pushes past him and runs back into the trench. He hauls up the wounded man James left behind.
Blinded by the smoke, roots and brambles searing his palms, James crawls away from the heat. The cries come from all around. And then he feels hands on him, a voice asking if he is alive. Yes, yes, I am alive. A hot broad blade is slid under him, and he grabs onto a wooden shaft; Hector drags him across the scree on a shovel. Overhead the smoke forms a vault. The trench is on fire. Jordison goes over the top with a man on his back, the sinews in his neck pronounced with the colossal effort.
The burning trench is the extreme edge of experience and sensation, the boundary between what is known and what is still in the process of formation.
James hears the distinctive sniper’s rifle fire, its concussive hoot like an enormous blow-pipe. Jordison falls, clutching the side of his head, blood seeping through a tiny hole in his skull and trickling across his scalp. Through the wall of flame, the sniper stands; he is disguised with vegetation so that branches rise like antlers from his brow. His weapon is a smooth cylinder with a needle-point barrel. And then he steps through the fire. The vegetation burns on him. The figure is wearing a dark suit and an oval mask that retards the flame. He is taller than a normal man. Some demon that has come through the veil. Jordison raises his head, eyes rolling back. The sniper fires again, casually downward, a fatal pinprick through the back of Jordison’s head. The white figure moves steadily through the fire, here and there, putting burning men out of their misery.
17
The armour approached from the other side of Newtimber Hill. With every iron footstep, the hillside tremored. A sine wave of starlings loosed across the sky. She was vulnerable. The armour could be coming for her. Ruth ran into a witchy copse and hid within the exposed root system of an old oak tree.
A horse and cart piled high with possessions came over the crest of the hill, followed by a long line of people, tired and dirty from the evicted life. More came, and the line broadened. So many familiar faces, but out of context. They were thinner too, from the life outside, their hair long and matted. She recognized clothes that had passed under her needle a long time ago. There was Arnold, a Dutch parent from the school. He had been evicted two years earlier. Arnold and his wife Martha moved in the same countercultural circles as the Von Pallandts. They had their own ideas about parental discipline and their daughter Cecile had gouged her initials into the kiss-kiss tree with her father’s knife. Arnold was evicted soon afterwards.
More familiar faces, a procession of incidental acquaintances from town life, people she was on nodding terms with because their morning or evening routine intersected with her own. Here was a man, grey-bearded and goatish, in his ancient polyester shirt, whose walk up Station Road coincided with her walk home from the school. He had been a commuter. Something in the public sector, she imagined, probably maintaining some terrible computer system. He seemed largely unchanged by life outside. Here was a woman she once met in the Lewes Arms. They’d enjoyed a nostalgic discussion about books, but never spoke to one another again. Ruth remembered how this woman had wailed and kicked when the armour threw her onto the cart.
After the Seizure, most people were redundant. The baron had explained it to her with characteristic cynicism.
“The likes of us have become a burden upon civilization,” he said. “In the past, we were tolerated because our vanities could be manipulated so that we took on debt. Vainly we aspired to better ourselves and thereby society. But meritocracy was only for the poor.” He had a pointed grey beard and aristocratic, almond eyes. “In reality, for all our high ideals, we were merely pretexts for debt; debt was our contribution, debt was how we created wealth. Our houses were debt. Our educations were debt. Our health was debt. Our trinkets, debt. Without debt, all we have is our data. We are data beasts in some fucking zoo, and it’s just a matter of which specimens are required, which pairs are to be bred.”
The baron was a defeated idealist. He had given up his estate on Eerde to a group who promised a revolution in consciousness. They were still on his land, working their way through the mystic traditions, pushing back the boundaries of their preconceptions, eating the food grown in his garden, sleeping in his bed.
He was an advocate of the Process. He agreed that the sole remaining value of the Lewesians – all they could take to market – was their data, and that data might offer spiritual understanding. What an opportunity the Process presented, to study the mind of the town! Perhaps, in the patterns of data produced by the group mind, elusive insights could be discerned. A quantitative study of thousands of inner lives would reveal what centuries of introspection and religious tradition had not.
“We will make the subjective into the objective and vice versa,” said the baron. “Capturing everything that happens here will allow us to recreate it in the future. Memories will not die. The past will become the present.”
The ground shimmered under the armour’s unsteady heavy gait. The armour did not seem out of place on the South Downs, its grinding iron sections and groaning vents reminding her of agricultural machinery: the armour as a plough or a furrow, a technology mankind had used from the very beginning. An ancient punishment device. Behind the misted colloid, the face of the son of the baron, Christopher Von Pallandt, was a flesh blur.
The evicted had been gathered from camps and other towns, with methods more carrot than stick (although, as the baron was fond of pointing out, both could be used as a weapon). The armour had appeared to the evicted in the car parks of the housing estates of St Leonard’s Warrior Square, at the perimeter of the tent cities outside Brighton, and pulling aside the barricades of the charity-maintained hotels of Eastbourne. The armour had cast the evicted out. Now it sought their return. Hope worked its magic on desperate souls and they came willingly.
The stragglers shared their stories of hardship, as if better times lay ahead. The old rumours of intervention by the administration, of a coming restoration, were aired. When the evictions first started, Ruth had asked the same question of the baron: “When will the government wake up to what has been happen
ing?” He replied, “A better question is: what will happen when we wake up to what has been happening with the government?” She pressed him further, but his answers were swingeing and apocalyptic, his rhetoric digging a hole just large enough for himself.
She followed the evicted down into the hamlet. Saddlescombe consisted of a few cottages ranged around a farm. On a field of pasture, a serried rank of bell tents had been pitched, and it was to these that the evicted were directed. The colloid clanked open to cool down the bailiff: Christopher’s head was tipped back, resting after subjugation to the Process. Two soldiers supervised refuelling the armour. They wore the same khaki uniforms as Hector. It was hard to tell, at first, if they were manufactured men or not. One of them, a slight boyish figure with an experienced wise face, popped the armour’s engine cover and drew a cup of scalding water from the radiator, which he then used to soften his beard and wet his razor, concentrating upon his reflection in an aluminium panel. He raised a sardonic eyebrow that made one eye appear distinctly larger than the other. She walked by with her head down, and when she looked back, he continued to shave in the metallic reflection; his gaze did not follow her departing figure.
A cottage had been converted into a café for the soldiers. The ceiling was low, and around an open iron stove, the men sat six to a bench, drinking thin beer and smoking thin cigarettes. Like Hector, they were indistinguishable from real people. She hesitated in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. She took a seat in the corner on a low wooden stool. The soldiers ignored her.
The café owner appeared with plates of omelette and chips, a woman with her dark blonde hair tied back in a ponytail: Jane Bowles, the mother of Agnes, the child Ruth betrayed.
Jane set the plates down in front of the soldiers, wiped her hands upon her apron, collected empty tin mugs from their table onto a tray, and then returned to the kitchen. She did not see Ruth, or if she did, she did not acknowledge her existence. Ruth followed her out back.
“Jane?”
Jane retied her ponytail. She had once told Ruth that, before she was a mother, her hair had been the colour of golden thread. After the birth of each of her children, it had turned progressively darker. Hormones no doubt, but Ruth regarded this darkening as an indication of the serious responsibility of parenthood, a deepening of the self unknown to her.
A coffee pot spluttered on the range. Jane wrapped a tea towel around the handle and put the pot to one side.
Ruth said, “I’m so sorry about what happened.” No, that was not enough. “About what I did.”
Jane unhooked a small cup from the wall and poured herself an inch of strong coffee.
“I would do anything to undo it.”
Jane sat wearily upon a high stool, sipped her coffee, then whispered, “What can you do?”
“We will take you back to Lewes.”
Jane unhooked a second cup from the wall, and poured coffee into it. She did not offer it to Ruth. The cup steamed.
Ruth said, “Have you seen James? Has he come through here?”
Jane tipped her head back and called her husband’s name. And then she repeated, in a resigned whisper, “What can you do?”
Ruth heard tools set down in the yard, the rasp of a boot scraper. Tom entered and the sight of him made her gasp: his head was shaven, and the right side of his face had slipped as after a stroke. His scalp was stained with haphazard splashes of iodine. He moved slowly across the kitchen, put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, leant forwards and nuzzled the back of her hair. Both of them had new implants, but whoever had performed the operation on Tom had been brutish. Jane’s implant was neater and almost concealed behind her ponytail, the pinched scarring exposed by her husband’s attention. Tom blew on his coffee to cool it.
“Where are your children?” she asked. “Euan and Agnes?”
Neither Jane nor Tom responded to her. She was a ghost to them. Not part of their pattern.
What can you do?
What had happened to the children? She walked out of the kitchen and trod quickly up a narrow staircase. On the landing, there were four doors, and one ajar. There, sitting up in bed reading, was the woman from the Institute, Alex Drown, with a violently bloodshot eye. She did not acknowledge Ruth’s presence either. The next bedroom held the empty marital bed, a chamber pot beneath it, and a grate of ash. The pillows on one side of the bed showed dull, scrubbed bloodstains. Clothes hung over the back of a chair and veins of green damp broke across the bowed ceiling. The bathroom contained a tin bath, no running water, and two wooden toothbrushes, his and hers, together in a clay pot. The last room was the children’s room. It was empty. Bare warped boards, a cold fireplace, and a cobwebbed window with a broken pane.
She walked into Alex Drown’s bedroom, closing the door behind her. Still Alex did not acknowledge her. The fire was lit. A grey dress and a white apron were drying on a clothes horse. Alex put her novel on the bedside table and turned over to sleep. Ruth crouched beside her, gazing intently at the woman’s resting face, hoping to spark the instinct of being watched. Alex’s small fists were bunched in the coarse blanket fibres. She fell asleep. The hands relaxed. And then she stirred awake.
“Ruth,” said Alex.
“You can see me.”
“Where am I?”
“In a cottage in Saddlescombe.”
Alex put her hand to her bloodshot eye and groaned.
“They put me under. It’s dangerous for me to go this deep into the Process.”
Alex looked askance at her blowsy nightie, then squinted painfully at the nurse’s uniform on the clothes horse.
“That’s mine, isn’t it?”
“You didn’t recognize me when I came in. You didn’t even see me.”
“When the implant is engaged, the Process puts layers over my perception. It must be screening you out. I had a safeguard put in which disengages the implant when I fall asleep, to prevent them from putting me under permanently. This isn’t the first time he’s involved me in his games.”
Alex looked around the room, then under the bed.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my real clothes?”
“Do you know where James is?”
“He’s part of the landing. He’s on the beach with the others.”
“The landing?”
“The war game.”
Alex glanced out of the window, at a squad of soldiers marching by.
Ruth was indignant. “A game?”
Alex hauled her big nightie over her head, exposing her neglected body, then reached over to the clothes horse; she flicked the grey serge dress out to see if it was dry, and finding it acceptably so, climbed into it and fastened the shoulder straps.
“It’s a game to him. Just because it’s a matter of life or death, doesn’t meant he can’t be playful,” said Alex, her face registering annoyance at her dowdy nurse’s shoes.
Anticipating Ruth’s next question, Alex said, “By him I mean my colleague at the Institute. I say colleague but I mean my patient. My employer. He often involves me in his games because he likes to exercise droit de seigneur over my mind.”
She picked up a white muslin cap.
“Do I have to wear this?” she asked.
“I saw the bailiff bring the evicted into the village. Some of them have implants.”
Alex looked concerned.
“He needs more players.”
“James said he wouldn’t be gone for long.” Then Ruth went quiet. She could not say another word without crying.
“Don’t cry. It won’t help,” said Alex. “We must get away from here.”
“I must take the children. A little girl I evicted.”
“James told me about that.”
“We’ve been so unkind, Alex. So caught up and confused.”
Alex buttoned her red cape, fixed her white cap.
“What are you suggesting?”
“That we stop collaborating with the Process. We could take control of our lives again.”<
br />
“You have more control within the Process than you ever had without it.”
“But this war…”
“How many wars were there under the old ways?”
Unsteadily, Alex led the way down the stairs.
“Malted milk,” she called back. “I must give the soldiers their malted milk.”
She jogged across the yard, her nurse’s cape fluttering behind her, and then onto the dirt track leading deeper into the farm. On the wind, Ruth caught a smell of something bad, something more corrupt than the usual farmyard odour.
The barn lay at the end of the dried mud track. The soft textures of poplar trees in the late afternoon sun. Rusted farm machinery. Troughs of rainwater. Birdsong. The lowing of cattle. No, not cattle.
She tried but failed to keep her fear out of her voice.
“What’s in the barn?”
“Wounded soldiers,” said Alex. But she was uncertain. A lock of black hair slipped from out of her nurse’s cap. She corrected it.
“I think the children may be in there too,” she said. Alex gathered her cape around her and walked with her head lowered into the barn.
The barn had been filled with cots, a hundred or more, arranged in a grid with narrow paths between them. Alex hung up her cape, washed her hands in a trough. Her gaze lengthened as she quietly slipped under the layers of the Process. Then she was just another nurse, administering tea and sympathy.
Arc lights spluttered and glared. The cots contained wounded men and women.
What can you do?
Ruth would check every cot for the children. The cool air of the barn was sweet and vile with medicinal vapours, burnt chemicals, sweat and blood. The wounded men did not see her. They were like the horse she had encountered up on the Downs: unfinished sculptures, incomplete constructions. These men came off the assembly line already broken. They were made to suffer. But, mixed in among the iodine and boracic powder, she could smell fear. Real human hormones. She walked quickly along the cots, checking to the left and to the right, until her path was blocked by a case of acute insanity, sitting up, crying and shaking. The automata, it seemed, had been invested with the very tips of human emotion. The nurses clustered around the cot. Coming closer, Ruth saw that the case of insanity was not in fact a manufactured soldier but Francis Sacks, one of the evicted, the man the people of Cliffe had fought to save. His scalp was splashed with iodine. The surgeon called for ether. The padre, his face in shadow, offered Sacks a cigarette to calm his nerves. She turned back rather than watch the procedure. The ether was administered. Sacks whimpered and fell silent, and she walked away from the awful thick sound of cutting, the sound of fat being scissored from a chop.
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