Let Us Be True

by Alex Christofi

  ‘I think he’s a good man,’ I said. ‘I know he seems a bit unfriendly, but I think he’s like you really. He’s kind of sad, and he’s finding it hard to admit to himself that a trailer park in Montana is where he’s ended up.’

  But Herb just shrugged and carried on watching some show about fat guys racing giant trucks.

  A bunch of bored kids cut the polytunnel to shreds with knives while Pete and Tracey were having a nap. They upended the cans and chucked the dirt at the sides of the trailers all around. Pete came out with a gun and roared at them but when the kids had run off laughing, he kind of slumped down into a camping chair that he’d put out there to watch his plants grow, covered his face with his hands and wept.

  ‘We had a beautiful farm, Rosine,’ Tracey told me. She’d tried to comfort her husband but he’d shaken her away angrily. ‘We worked hard. We grew potatoes and peppers and tomatoes and corn. We raised our own chickens and pigs. We even had a guy working for us for a while. We were proud, and our families were proud of us, because we were the first generation, on his side or mine, to own our land.’

  Hearing Pete shouting, Herb had come out too, tearing himself away from some hub show where he’d parked his brain, about plastic surgery gone wrong, or the world’s ugliest women.

  ‘What happened with your farm?’ he asked Pete.

  ‘Water prices,’ Pete said. ‘Our wells dried up. Me and Tracey spent tens of thousands of bucks buying this damn thing and that damn thing to cut down our consumption, but in the end we just couldn’t make it work.’

  ‘We’d built it all ourselves,’ Tracey said. ‘Our fences, our tunnels, our barn, our house even.’

  ‘The bank took it,’ said Pete. ‘Not that it’ll do them any good. There are people giving up their farms every day in that part of California. The land’s worth nothing at all.’

  There wasn’t much to say to that. You could look around all you liked at the rows of identical trailers under that great lonely prairie sky and you wouldn’t find any source of comfort.

  ‘One thing I’m hoping for,’ Herb said, ‘and that’s that Senator Slaymaker gets in. He’s the only one that’s really trying to help folk like us.’

  CHAPTER 23

  Holly met Mariana in Seattle to do some Christmas shopping. They had lunch together, they found some nice things to buy, and managed quite successfully to edge around Holly’s job without getting into a fight. Now, chatting and laughing, they were walking back through the pretty colored lights to where they’d left the car, and avoiding eye contact, without even thinking about it, with the dozens of barreduras who were begging insistently in the busy streets. You screened them out just as you screened out your own painful memories. There would otherwise be no happiness at all.

  Next to the car park at the edge of the pedestrian area, a little Victorian church squatted incongruously between two tall office blocks and outside it was a nativity scene set on a dais: a little stable lit up from inside, and plaster figurines the size of human fingers.

  ‘You’d think we’d have given up those fairy tales in the twenty-second century, wouldn’t you?’ said Mariana.

  Holly shook her head and laughed as she stopped to look. ‘No chance, Mariana. No chance. Stories are what we live by!’

  It was actually rather a fine nativity, it seemed to her, cleverly lit so as to draw the eye inwards to the baby at the center of it all, with the little people and animals ranged around him.

  ‘Very pretty,’ acknowledged Mariana. ‘If only we weren’t expected to believe it was real. That just feels, I don’t know, embarrassing at this point in history.’

  Holly squatted down so the tableau was at head height, and tried to imagine that she was there herself inside the miniature stable.

  ‘Well, what do people like us believe in?’ she said, standing up again, but still facing the tableau.

  ‘Uh...reason, I guess. And fairness.’

  ‘I’d say so too. And we believe that we’re reasonable and fair, don’t we? We believe that if only the world would come to its senses and become as reasonable and fair as us, then everything would be okay.’

  Mariana considered this for a couple of seconds. ‘I think I do believe that, yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘That belief of ours looks a bit threadbare now, don’t you think? We’re running out of time, and the world’s as bad as it ever was.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ she laughed. ‘But what’s that got to do with this nativity?’

  ‘It just struck me: suppose our belief is just as unreal as all the others. Suppose humans can’t really get any better? I mean, we’re the product of millions of years of evolution, yes? The ones who weren’t so good at looking after themselves were winnowed out, the ones who were best at it survived. With that kind of lineage, it’s asking a lot of us to really care that much about anyone other than ourselves. And yet, we do have reason, and with our reason we are able to form ideas like fairness, and freedom and justice. We can see them, we can see that they’re something good, but maybe they’re beyond our reach? Like we’re two-dimensional beings and they exist out there in 3D space.’

  She shrugged and half-smiled, acknowledging that the thought wasn’t characteristic of her, and that Mariana shouldn’t feel obliged to take it any further. They started to walk again.

  ‘How do you know they’re beyond our reach?’ asked Mariana.

  ‘Well, I talk to people a lot these days on the whisperstream, not just people like us but people from every demographic across America, and that’s how it seems to me. Everyone lays claim to virtue. Everyone clothes themselves in ideas like fairness or justice or freedom, but they do so in their own interests, to make themselves feel entitled, or virtuous, or more virtuous than others. It’s all on the surface, like painting a cross on your shield before you sack Jerusalem. But underneath, everyone still plays the same old animal game.’

  ‘There’s always that element in us, I guess.’

  ‘In fact, even our precious reason is pretty selective about what it chooses to take into account. It always comes out in our favor, doesn’t it? It always turns out that we delicados and our needs are really really important, along with whatever oppressed groups we are currently identifying with. It doesn’t take much notice of less appealing folk like Henry McKenzie in Spokane, Washington.’

  ‘Who’s Henry McKenzie?’

  ‘Exactly! Who is he, and who gives a shit?’

  Mariana glanced sideways at Holly. She’d never seen her in quite this mood.

  ‘And truthfully,’ Holly said, ‘when it comes to the reality of those shining things out there in the third dimension – their real essence, I mean, as opposed to their use as badges of virtue – we can’t really do more than glimpse them far off in the distance.’

  ‘Are you...are you having second thoughts about...you know... the work you’re doing for...?’

  ‘No, I’m bloody not,’ snapped Holly. ‘That’s not what this is about at all.’

  And then she laughed and took Mariana’s hand.

  ‘Sorry. Ignore me. I’m not sure what I mean myself. I guess just for a moment it made sense to me, that nativity story, the idea of someone from that other dimension being born into the 2D world, someone capable of forgiving us for our inability to be what we know we ought to be.’

  ‘You’re not getting religious on us, are you, Holly? Going over to the Freedom Party is kind of challenging enough.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all. It just struck me what a powerful story that is. How it reaches right in there and addresses a deep core need. And I like powerful stories.’

  She gave a hundred-dollar bill to a startled farmer from New Mexico and then they went into a shop to buy shoes.

  By that time, the competition for the Freedom Party candidacy had resolved into a three-way race.

  Lucy Montello, a former governor of Montana, was a sharp-faced, bitter woman whose core support was among middle-class northerners. She focused a lot of her campaigning on the so-cal
led ‘Mexican problem’, a tried and tested gambit, though it always carried the risk of alienating the 40 percent of Americans who defined themselves as Latino. Montello maintained that there were as many as thirty million illegal Mexican immigrants in the US and that, in spite of the wall and the fence and the minefield, illegal migrants from Mexico were still entering the US at the rate of twenty thousand a month. Her solution to the problem of weather-related homelessness in the southern half of the country was to find and remove illegal immigrants, thereby freeing accommodation for the use of American citizens: ‘Let’s not ask hard-working Americans in the north to make yet more sacrifices for a problem that isn’t of their making,’ she said. ‘And let’s not tell hard-working people in the south that they have to move away from their own communities to make room for Mexicans.’

  Under her presidency, she said, illegal migrants would face not just deportation but long prison sentences with hard labor, such as were now being used in several European countries. (In Britain, she pointed out, highly profitable prison factories staffed by interned immigrants had become a key component of the economy.) They could replace those indentured workers in their yellow jumpsuits, now brought in by licensed contractors to perform time-limited tasks where there were local labor shortages. And these foreign workers wouldn’t need to be paid anything at all.

  Soames Frinton was a multi-billionaire engineer who’d founded the Electric Highway Corporation, the company that developed and rolled out the so-called dodgem lanes where cars could charge up on the move. He believed that states had the right to control their own frontiers – ‘If any state is struggling to deliver to its own citizens,’ he said, ‘it should be entitled to close the door until better times come round again’ – and he was strongly opposed to any federal government support for barreduras wishing to move from their own states. If people wanted to move away from storm- or drought-ravaged areas to states that had the capacity to receive them, then they must do so themselves, just as people had moved back and forth across America over the centuries: ‘My own great-grandfather moved with his family from Chicago down to Atlanta, and then Houston, and then LA. My grandfather and grandmother moved from LA up to Portland, Oregon. My father moved from Oregon to New York City. My wife and I started our family in Seattle, spent two years in Boston, and right now we’re based in the fine city of Juneau, Alaska. And guess what, people, we made all those moves just fine without any help from the federal government.’

  Of course, this approach too carried risks. It might please voters in the north, but many in the south would be angered by its callousness. How could the movements of a wealthy family be compared to an exodus from abandoned homes? But Frinton and Montello both knew that, when it came to the party convention, strong support from northern states could be enough to win the Freedom Party nomination.

  ‘Who’s going to pay for these new houses Senator Slaymaker proposes to build?’ asked Lucy Montello. ‘Who’s going to fund his scheme to help southerners move north? Well, what do you know? It’s going to be the good old northern taxpayer as usual. The hard-working heroes who slog their guts out for this country, and then find they’ve got to pay for everything as well.’

  ‘If you want to pay out your own money,’ said Soames Frinton, ‘to build a housing estate for barreduras next to your home, which will spoil your view, reduce the value of your property, increase the local crime rate and place your job at risk, well then, be my guest, go out and vote for Slaymaker.’

  As the New Year began, almost all Holly’s time was spent unpicking Montello’s and Frinton’s stories. Over and over, she and the team pushed out images of strong fortresses, deeply laid foundations, mighty powerhouses. Over and over they told stories about an America regrouped, retooled, rejuvenated so as to be able to face the challenges ahead. Over and over they stamped on any suggestion that the barreduras would be helped out of kindness, or pity, or altruism, insisting that Slaymaker’s entire program was about the needs of America as a whole.

  And it seemed to be working. Slaymaker, with his folksy charm, was seen as more trustworthy than Montello and Frinton, in spite of his controversial program, and was holding his own in the polls.

  ‘I have to hand it to you, Holly,’ Jed admitted, over a working lunch in the kitchen of Slaymaker’s Seattle offices. ‘I never really thought you’d pull this off.’

  ‘Well, you helped, Jed. Until I met you, I might have made the mistake of appealing to people’s kindness. You showed me just how little kindness can be worth.’

  Jed laughed easily, showing his long white teeth. He enjoyed digs like these. In fact, Holly had an uneasy feeling that he read them as a form of flirtation. ‘You really aren’t one of us, are you, Holly? That Native American broach, those comfortable clothes, that bag that cost no more than two thousand dollars. There’s an unmistakable delicado glow coming off of you, no matter how you try to hide it.’

  It was one thing for Holly to criticize her own tribe, but another for the likes of Jed to do so. ‘I looked up “delicado” once,’ she said. ‘It means subtle, refined, sensitive, polite. I can live with that.’

  ‘It was a term of abuse back in the days of the Tyranny,’ Jed said. ‘Like “snowflake” or “bleeding heart”.’

  ‘I think we delicados should be proud that the tyrants felt the need to abuse us.’

  ‘The tyrants didn’t make up the word, though. They just deployed it. They figured out that ordinary folk were sick of being told off for not being generous enough by people who were way better off than themselves. Don’t forget, our delicados aren’t the first privileged class to flatter themselves that they’re kinder and gentler than their social inferiors. Think about the word “gentlefolk” and what it means.’

  ‘You really despise gentleness, don’t you? Didn’t your mum and dad love you enough, or what?’

  ‘Didn’t my mum and dad love me? Wonderful! The classic move of the delicado trying to explain why other people don’t see the world as they do!’ He grinned at her. This was all play to him, play if not actual flirtation. ‘Make other people’s views into pathology! That way you can have the satisfaction of being right and being magnanimous! I just happen to admire strength and self-reliance, okay? My own impression is that pretty much all so-called kindness, if not all, is ultimately self-serving. So I figure if we’re going to be self-serving, then why not just be so openly, rather than wrapping it up in sugary fluff.’

  She noticed his defensiveness, the shining-eyed defiance, as he spoke words very similar to ones she’d used herself with Richard and her friends.

  Later that day, she took some time out to buy a few things, and was making her way down Broad Street back to the office. The sun was bright and low and the air sharp, with long thin strands of cirrus streaking the cold blue above her. She passed some graffiti on a brick wall:

  NO MORE SLASH AND BURN

  It was the slogan of the World Salvationist Society, the violent faction who wanted to stop human expansionism and restore equilibrium with the rest of nature. But standing right in front of it was the representative of another creed entirely. A Tribulationist preacher with bushy white eyebrows was telling whoever would listen that the floods on the east coast and the droughts in the south-west were God’s punishment for the sin of sodomy.

  ‘They can run from their wrecked homes,’ he bellowed. ‘They run like naughty children from the parent who comes to reprimand them, but they can’t hide from the wrath of God.’

  Ping! A message arrived in her cristal. ‘We’re absolutely devastated,’ her mother said. ‘Me and your father are absolutely devastated. We just can’t believe that you’re working for a party that both of us, and our parents, and all our friends, have struggled against all our lives. Antonia thinks you must be punishing us for something.’

  Holly thought at first it meant nothing to her. She felt oddly indifferent. The reaction was so predictable, after all, that it barely constituted new information. Richard would probably even argue
that she’d deliberately provoked it. Of course her mother would refuse to accept that Holly could have made a choice that was different to her own. Of course she’d have spoken to her psychotherapist friend Antonia.

  Holly remembered Antonia well from her teenage years, that slow, quiet presence, those lingering soft brown eyes. Many times Holly had slouched in from somewhere to find her sitting with her mother at the kitchen table. Antonia would always greet her warmly, her smiling eyes searching Holly’s surly face with loving concern, and Holly would know, she’d just know, that the two of them had been discussing her moods, her outbursts of temper, her hostility. Her mother had to believe some kind of psychological disturbance was the explanation for Holly disagreeing with her. She always had done.

  But why fret about it? That was just the way her mother was. She’d never change and Holly was grown up now, and a long way away.

  But then, in spite of what she’d just told herself, anger came welling up. No doubt, if she’d been present, Antonia would have nodded wisely as she saw the rage break from cover. ‘Let it out,’ she’d have advised, ‘let it out, Holly darling.’ Tears came pricking into Holly’s eyes, right there in the winter sunshine, and she dashed them furiously away. She’d tried to explain her decision to her mother. She’d tried to show that she actually hadn’t discarded everything she and her dad believed in. But they hadn’t even tried to understand. They hadn’t engaged in any way with what she’d said.

  To the north of the pier, there was a sort of park between the city’s flood defenses and the sea, which had become a meeting place for jobless barreduras from the desert states (the storm people had their own gathering place in Denny Park). There were scores of them down there, rugged, suntanned men and women, wrapped in coats, scarves and sometimes blankets, standing stamping their feet, or sitting on the benches, filling in time before the next job interview, the next appointment with the welfare department, or perhaps just waiting until the sun went down, and it was time to go back to their trailers, their rented tenements, their crumbling families. Seattle residents, some on bicycles, some on foot, passed through them on a narrow pathway, mostly looking straight ahead so as to avoid meeting the eyes of these troubling fellow Americans. It was as if the fact of their losing their homes had made these people in some way dangerous and unclean.