Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I’ve known a few.”

  He nodded happily. “As have I.”

  I sat forward in my armchair. “Michael,” I said. “As one professional to another, could you please tell me when I can go home?”

  He sat back and crossed his legs and looked sad. “I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible,” he told me. “Not at the moment, anyway. Never, possibly. Probably.”

  “Why not?”

  He sniffed. “There was an accident. A terrible accident. The Campus is uninhabitable now.”

  I stared at him. I had thought that, whenever I heard this news from someone else, it would be hard for me to feign shock, but it wasn’t hard at all. I felt the sheer weight of loss well up from some awful depth in which I had hidden it from myself. When Baines had given me the news the shock had numbed me. He and Bevan had shown me pictures of nuclear explosions and their aftermath, and explained, as well as they could, the effects of radiation, and afterward I thought I had come to terms with it. But I hadn’t. The pain of losing Araminta was almost beyond belief. I felt it start to overwhelm me, and I let it.

  When it was over, and I was sitting there sniffing and shivering and Michael had given me a hankie to dry my tears and a glass of Scotch to stiffen my spirits, he said, “I really am sorry, old chap.”

  “Everyone?” I said quietly.

  “So far as we can judge. I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, and I meant it. I had shunted everything to the back of my mind in a simple attempt to cope with it. I had never addressed it head-on. I felt rising waves of despair and anger. I could never go back to the place I came from, because it no longer existed. I was, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the last representative of an extinct species. I wanted to punish the people who had destroyed my world, to punish them hard, bring their own world down around their ears. And I knew that was hopeless. Unless I ever got my hands on one of these nuclear weapons, there was nothing I could do.

  I said, “The Professor said the Science Faculty were making things. I didn’t realise he meant bombs.”

  Michael looked a little uncomfortable. “It’s a long and tragic story,” he said. He brightened a little. “But you’re here now, and we’ll look after you.”

  “How?”

  He crossed his legs and regarded me for a while. “Well, you have an Intelligence background. How would you like a job?”

  THE COMMUNITY STRETCHED from what would have been the Iberian Peninsula in Europe, to a little east of where Moscow was, and from the Scandinavian coast as far south as Sicily. The bulk of the population was gathered in a handful of towns and cities across the Continent, connected by a vast network of railways. The rest of the land was agricultural, with some heavy industrial areas in the West and East. Sparsely-populated and rich in natural resources, it was, compared to Europe, a phenomenally wealthy nation. There was full employment, there was no poverty, everyone had plenty to eat. Great electricity pylons towered over the countryside, carrying current from coal-fired power stations to homes everywhere. The people drove electric cars.

  It was very, very quiet.

  Europe had been like a huge asylum, a deafeningly noisy and busy place. The Community seemed to be in a dream, drifting along in slow gentility. My first Winter there was wet and mild, and I had a sense of a great stillness stretching out all around me, to the edges of the world. Because, like the Campus, the Community was the world. The Whitton-Whytes had not bothered to fill the rest of the map in when they were finished with their work of creation. The Community was an orphan universe. Unlike the Campus, though, everyone here understood the nature of their world.

  You could travel right to the edge of the Continent, in all directions, and see the sea, and know that, apart from Ernshire to the North, that was all there was. Some of the inhabitants had set sail in great steamships to explore the oceans to the West, and had returned after months to report that the water seemed to go on into infinity. There was a series of popular novels in Europe about a world borne through space on the back of a turtle, and the Community was like that. A wealthy family’s indulgence, a toy more exquisite and complex than any Fabergé egg.

  And it was beautiful. When they finally let me out of the house I was given some money and allowed to travel, chaperoned by a pleasant young man named William. William and I took trains and carriages and boats for hundreds of miles, and everywhere was like a garden, laid out with the careful formality of an English landscape gardener. It was a dream, the Whitton-Whytes’ dream of a perfect England.

  It was all one country. There were no provinces, because provinces promoted regional identity and regional identity promoted separatism, and separatism was dangerous. The whole nation was administered by a single Presiding Authority whose President-for-life was little more than a figurehead. The real power lay with the Committee of the Presiding Authority, and the real power within the Committee lay with the Directorate.

  Michael worked for the Directorate, and once I was done sightseeing and learning about my new home, so did I.

  5

  AFTER THE MEETING, Horace and I walked back to his house.

  “How do you think it went?” he asked.

  “It went well,” I said. “But you were among friends. Nobody there was going to argue with you.”

  He nodded and turned his collar up against the chill. After the hot, charged atmosphere in the cellar the night air was bitingly cold.

  “We need more people like that,” he said. “Spreading the word. Taking action.”

  I settled my hat more firmly on my head. Victoria’s streets were narrow and steep; the wind blew constantly up from the harbour, sending dust and bits of rubbish spinning. In the Winter, it also blew rain and snow and sleet with the velocity of pistol bullets. Winter was still several months away, but it was already cold enough to nip your ears painfully.

  I said, “What you really need to do is convince the owners.”

  Horace snorted. “We’ll be waiting a long time for that train to arrive.”

  We turned down a side-street. If anything, the wind was even stronger here; it rattled the glass enclosures of the gas-lamps lining the pavement and made their flames hiss and roar. Europe, with its bustling twenty-four-hour cities, had made the Campus seem almost deserted, but Victoria at night made the Campus seem crowded. We had not seen another living soul since leaving the meeting, unless you counted a threadbare dog which had fled at our approach.

  “They’re the ones with the power here,” I said. “The owners. I’m sorry, but you can’t do anything without them.”

  He looked at me, a stout, hard man, like a barrel carved from solid oak. “They won’t listen,” he said. “We’ve tried.”

  “I know, old chap,” I said. “I know.”

  Horace was a fisherman. Almost all the men in Victoria were fishermen, the majority of them crews on the sturdy steam-powered fishing boats which sailed from the harbour every few days and returned with holds packed with cod and haddock and plaice. Almost all the women worked in the fisheries which gutted and prepared the catch before it was taken off to Władysław – most of it went to the capital – by train. It was hard, unremitting, hazardous labour – the cemetery on the hill above the town was lined with the headstones of men who had not lived beyond their thirties – and it was criminally-underpaid. True poverty was rare in the Community, but you only had to compare the rows of fishermen’s cotes down by the harbour with the big houses of the boat owners just along the coast to know who was really profiting from the fishing industry. It had been like this for generations, and few people ever questioned it because that was the way the whole Community worked.

  The fishermen in Victoria had begun to question it, though, and I had been sent by the Władysław Intelligencer to report on the unrest.

  Victoria was a long way from the capital. If it had been in Europe, it would have been somewhere on the Norwegian coast, and the people were grey and hard and taciturn, an
d the ‘unrest’ I had been sent to report on had turned out to be a dozen or so fishermen meeting in each others’ homes and complaining that they were not being paid enough for the risks they were taking every working day.

  Compared to some of the industrial unrest I had seen on the news in Europe, it barely qualified as background grumbling, and I was finding it difficult to find the right tone for my dispatches for the Intelligencer. The editor, a man named Stoker who thought he was intimidating, kept sending me gruff telegrams telling me to ‘boost’ my stories. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been intimidated by true experts.

  We reached Horace’s cote, where his wife, Rowena, had a late dinner of fish pie waiting for us. I’d met them a few days ago, after spending a week or so talking to fishermen about the situation up here. Rowena was as stout as Horace, and almost as strong. She worked at one of the fisheries and had, so far as I could discern, no sense of humour at all. She and Horace barely spoke to each other when I was there.

  The fish pie, at least, was excellent.

  After dinner, Horace and I repaired to the parlour for a smoke. Horace smoked a fierce brand of tobacco which smelled like bonfires; the whole cote stank of it. We sat by the fire for a while, listening to Rowena in the kitchen doing the dishes.

  Finally, Horace said, “We’re thinking about withdrawing our labour.”

  “Yes?” I said, lighting a cigarette.

  “It’s as you said,” he went on. “We need to get the owners’ attention.”

  “I never told you to lay down your tools,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word ‘strike’ because it was almost unknown in the Community and it seemed rather pale in comparison to the million or so strikers who had taken to the streets of Albania while I was in the clinic.

  “They won’t listen to us,” Horace said. “Not while we just ask nicely.”

  That at least was true enough. I looked at him. He was a decent man. All he wanted was an honest wage for an honest day’s work. Now was not the time to tell him that the world didn’t work like that.

  I said, “It’s a big step. They could just sack you, throw you out of your cotes, and employ someone else.”

  “I’d like to see them try,” he grunted. “What are they going to do? Crew the boats with farmers?”

  From what I’d seen of the hill country inland, anybody mad enough to try and farm there was mad enough to go to sea. We sat looking into the fire for a while, thinking about that.

  He said, “People need to know what’s happening here.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “No,” he said. “They need to know the truth. Not some scrubbed-up version of it. They need to know how bad our lives are.”

  Compared to my final few months in the Campus, Horace and Rowena and all the other fisher-folk lived like kings. There was no easy way to explain this to him, so I just said, “I’m here to tell your story.”

  “We need the people on our side,” he said, and my heart almost broke.

  I said, “There’s some –” and then I stopped myself by an enormous effort of will. “Horace,” I started again. “You can’t win. You’ll ruin your life and Rowena’s and everyone else’s. You’ll lose your job and your home and the owners will just go on as if you never existed.”

  He didn’t reply for quite a while. He sat looking into the flames the way I had seen some people in Europe looking into their tablets. Calmly rapt, oblivious while the world went on around them.

  “My dad was forty when he died,” he said. “He was washed off the deck of the Heavenly Lucie in a storm. My granddad was lead stoker on the Far Horizon. He was standing next to her boiler when it exploded. He was thirty. His father, my great-granddad, had his own boat. The Lady Caroline, after my gran.” He shrugged. “Nobody knows what happened to him. Sailed out one morning and never came back. No storm, no wreckage. Nothing. A boat and fourteen men, just gone. My great-granddad was thirty-eight. Hisfather –”

  “I’m following you, Horace,” I said gently.

  He smiled a little. “All those dead men, none of them over forty. And for what?” He looked up from the fire and gestured at the parlour. “Look at how we live. And then go down the coast to Wrenhaven and see how the people who own the boats – who own us – live.” He leaned forward, took a poker from the hearth, and thrust it into the fire. A column of sparks roared up the chimney. “I go to sea and I come back and I don’t get anywhere. None of us do. We’re just walking on the spot. What’s the point of carrying on when the only point is to carry on?”

  I had no answer to that. Instead I said, “My parents were academics. My father taught English; my mother taught History. Their parents were all academics too, and their grandparents. It was... traditional, where I’m from. I’ll grant you what they did wasn’t as dangerous as what you do, but they never managed to improve their lives a single jot. Things only got worse, in fact.”

  Horace put the poker back in the hearth and sat back. “What did they do?”

  They both died of illnesses that could easily have been treated in Europe, I thought. Then I helped to lead a revolution and only made things worse. I said, “They didn’t do anything. They couldn’t.”

  “Well I can do something,” Horace said. “I can stand up on behalf of the fishermen and tell the owners that we won’t be taken for fools any more. I can make them take us seriously as men. You tell the people in Władysław that.”

  “All right,” I said. “I promise I’ll do that.”

  AND I DID. It was almost midnight when I got back to the rooming house where I was staying. It was high up on the ladder of streets that made up Victoria, almost on the edge of the rough craggy moorland that lay behind the town, and from my desk at the window I could look down on stepped rows of slate rooftops that descended to the half-moon of the harbour and the boats sleeping there. Beyond them, its wavetops touched with moonlight, was the hard sheen of the sea.

  Under the light of the desk-lamp, I took out a pad of writing paper and a fountain pen and began to rough out my story. I put in everything Horace had told me to put in, and then I began chopping it up and copying it onto a pad of forms I had bought from the local telegraph office a few days earlier.

  When I’d finished, I sat looking at my reflection in the window. I’d lost some of the weight I had put on in Europe, but my face was still unfamiliar to me, well-fed and filled-out. The last of my kind.

  I took up my pen again, turned to a clean page of writing paper, and began to write another kind of story.

  THE NEXT MORNING, after a hearty breakfast of smoked fish and home-baked bread, I walked down into the town. I had two envelopes in my pocket. At the telegraph office, I took a wad of forms from one of the envelopes and waited patiently while the clerk counted the words of my dispatch to the Intelligencer to make sure I hadn’t tried to sneakily over-run the pre-paid limit. When the clerk was satisfied, he took the forms into the back room for transmission to Władysław, and I went back out into the cold windy day.

  Further down the hill, nearer the harbour, was a tea-shop called Annie’s. It was dark and shabby and I had never seen more than three people there, sitting in miserable silence with cups of tea and a plate of scones. I sat down at one of the tables by the window and when the waitress came over I ordered tea.

  The tea arrived, and while it brewed in the pot I got up and went to the lavatory. There were two cubicles. Neither was occupied. I went into the furthest one, closed the door behind me, took the second envelope from my pocket, and, reaching up, slipped it behind the cistern. I left the cubicle, washed my hands, and went back to my tea.

  I LEFT VICTORIA a couple of days later. About a month after that, Horace and Rowena and the regulars at the meetings quietly disappeared. Nobody knew where they’d gone. A rumour went round that they had all decided to move south, to try and find other work, but nobody believed it. The fishermen of Victoria went to work as usual. Nobody talked of laying down tools again.
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br />   THERE WAS A similar situation among the coal miners of Hawshire a few months later. Again, I went down there to report for the paper, and again there were disappearances and things became quiet again. Everywhere I went, calm and contentment seemed to follow in my wake, along with a few homes missing a family member.

  By this time, Michael had decided I had a taste for it. During dull evenings, I had started writing real articles for the Intelligencer, just to occupy my time. I’d included these with my reports to the Directorate, and Michael had decided they were worth submitting to the paper, a bit of harmless colour to backstop my cover story. The editor seemed to like them, and I started getting requests for bona fide articles about events in various parts of the country. I became a journalist without portfolio, and soon my work for the Intelligenceroutweighed the work I was doing for the Directorate. They paid well, too.

  I did that for five years.

  6

  “WE HAVE A... thing,” Michael said.

  “A thing?”

  “Hm. How to put it? An errand, really, I suppose. In Europe.”

  We were sitting in his office at the Directorate, a room with a desk and some filing cabinets and a couple of chairs and a large and luxuriant potted aspidistra in one corner. It was Spring, and I had just returned from a long trip to the East to report on a song festival for the paper.

  “Europe,” I said.

  “We were wondering if you’d be interested.”

  “Of course.”

  “You have some experience over there, and to be honest we’ve hardly been making the best use of your talents recently. It should only take a day or so.”

  “I could use a change of scenery,” I mused.

  “We can’t let you go alone, of course,” he said apologetically. No offence intended. It was Directorate policy: no unaccompanied trips across the border.