“I have been passed a message delivered an hour ago to the mayor of this asylum. It was issued by the General Wardian glory trust. I shall read it to you. ‘This morning our Naclaski stations traced radio emissions to a location within Brent Cross asylum. As warning shots have failed to deter this flouting of the law, we hit the source of the broadcasts, which ceased. Let it be hoped that Brent Cross will maintain control of its citizens from now on’.”
Vasco Banner paused, drawing out the fury of the crowd.
“Today marks a new depravity in the standards of the dogs.”
The crowd growled with anger.
“Here I have a declaration sealed by every factory owner of this asylum.” He held up a sheet of vellum from which the ribbons of the factory owners’ seals dangled like coloured seaweed. “This is what it says. ‘We seal our trust in the National Party’.” He let the implication sink in. “The old feud of capital and labour is finished. Now we are one. Solidarity, unity, nation.”
The chant caught. Solidarity. Unity. Nation. The slogan of the long-extinct SUN Party roared again! Thousands of fists across the lake pulsed as one. Donald’s was one of them. Isolated far from the servile affectations of decent society, his mind inflamed with excitement. He swam an ocean of minds as outraged as his. Yet he also looked down upon himself, fist high, boxing a future in which this moment must always be a secret.
*
They found Sarah-Kelly inside the marquee tent, cranking at a Banda machine. She shook Bartram off when he wrapped his arms around her.
“Gerroff! I’ve thousands of these to do.”
Bartram stood with tears running off his cheeks.
“We thought you were blown in bits, Skay.”
“Get more ink—there’s tins over there.”
“Look…” Bartram eased Sarah-Kelly from the machine and nodded for a younger brother to take over. Her face was haggard, her eyes worn from sobbing. Bartram cuddled her. When he turned her to face Donald, she staggered back in astonishment.
“Oh my good God.” She laughed a great sarcastic cackle and added: “You make a convincing slummy, well, sort-of.” In that cackle, with all its rich derision, Donald instantly knew why Lawrence would have fallen for this young woman. “Your sort don’t belong here. This is our tragedy, not yours.”
“It’s everyone’s tragedy.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Stop having a go at him,” Bartram said. “He was at the craters, he chanted with all the rest.”
Sarah-Kelly frowned, eyeing Donald from this angle and that, as if he were a tempting but unknown fruit—one that might or might not be poisonous.
“You can’t trust those people. I know some of them have joined the Party, they’re all hypocrites; they know we’re going to win.”
“I came here to apologise to you. I called you a liar and I was wrong,” Donald said. She showed him her backside—a firm and shapely backside, he noted—bending to pile leaflets into a box. “I’m at risk just by being here, so don’t waste my time telling me whether I mean it.”
The anger in his voice impressed her enough to straighten up and face him again with a more contemplative pose.
“So you came to apologise. That’s nice. I accept your apology. You must have taken a lot of trouble to get out here, as you can’t have come out under your real identity. What do you want?”
“Details. I am not going just sit on my arse while my brother wastes his life pounding gravel for a crime he didn’t do. I need details to get started.”
“We can’t talk here. We’ll go back to North Ken.”
This suited Donald. The shelling of the asylum had turned the National Party annual conference into an emergency room. Messengers constantly came and went. Banner remained buried from view in a seething clot of advisors, lackeys, agitators and pontificators. Donald was not going to be able to have useful discussions with Party officials, so he was taking needless risks by remaining. When he saw a familiar face enter the tent, he knew it was time to get out of sight. The face was that of Team Lieutenant Theo Farkas, the glory officer who had brought him home from the Lands of Dasti-Jones. He was dressed as a typical asylum resident in denim dungarees and heavy boots.
“I’ll see you outside,” Donald said.
*
At the frontier of the Friendly Cooperative of North Kensington basin, Donald was delayed in the customs house. By the time he was through, the Newman brood had already gone home.
He walked a mile around the basin to the gate of the Newman business. It was locked. No one was in view. The Tibetan mastiffs lifted their ears and did not so much growl as rumble.
While wondering what to do, he ambled to the edge of the quay and admired a large flying boat moored just outside the Newman’s basin. It was a fabulously futuristic machine relative to the clumsy biplanes he was accustomed to seeing. This machine was constructed like a ship, of metal plates rivetted together. The fuselage was sleek like a dogfish, broad at the front narrowing to a single thin fin with blade-like tail planes. Two thicker fins projected low down, just behind the cockpit. These were half-immersed in the opaque basin and presumably gave the hull stability while afloat without the drag of wing stabilisers. Most impressive were the wings, long and impossibly thin like the wings of a seagull, perched on a pylon above the fuselage. The engines were streamlined within slender nacelles set across the wings like rowing skiffs. It all suggested an heirloom of the Public Era. If so, it was in remarkably good condition for being more than seventy years old.
A hatch in the cockpit roof banged open and a man climbed out. He was a tall fellow, with broad shoulders, a prominent, sharp chin and well-developed pectoral muscles. He moved on his toes, cat-like, stepping down footholds in the side of the hull to a small rowing boat, all the while wrapping up a bundle and not even looking down. When he turned to sit in the boat, he spotted Donald and stopped dead.
“What do you want?” he shouted.
“That’s a very beautiful machine.”
Now the owner of the flying boat was across to the dock, up on the quay and staring through the gate all in a matter of moments, without the mastiffs having raised their heads. At this close range, the trim body and its agility became the more surprising, for he was not a young man. The hawkish face creased deeply around the mouth and nostrils. Thin eyes scraped details, lingering on Donald’s face, memorising, prompting Donald to take a step back out of the reach of those yard-long arms. This was like swapping stares with a pissed-off leopard at a zoo.
“Tell me who you are.”
The flying boat’s owner spoke with a meticulous clarity. The voice lacked any hint of background, be it asylum or public school.
“Do you need to know?” Donald said.
The thin eyes flickered. He turned one cheek away to look sidelong, becoming curious.
“My name is Prentice Nightminster. You’ll get more out of life when you see comrades, instead of strangers.”
This news startled Donald. Thirty-three years after the Sack of Oxford, Nightminster, once the beau of Victorina Krossington, must by now be in his early fifties. Yet to the casual eye he looked about forty. Relative to the photograph from the evening of May Day 2073, the hair had receded and paled, accentuating the dome of the cranium. The eyes were even thinner, so thin it was hard to see more than the intense black points of the pupils.
“Nightminster of the Value System, I presume,” Donald said.
“The Value System is my business, yes.”
“These boots you produce are excellent.”
“So glad you like them.” Nightminster pulled a cold smirk. “Presumably you wish to meet the Newmans?”
“I hope to, eventually.”
“See you inside.”
Nightminster turned his back, taking a detour to check his machine’s moorings and give the hounds a pat before ambling into the Newman mansion. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. About ten minutes lat
er, Bill appeared on the wharf. Donald managed to catch his attention and finally get let in.
*
Nightminster and Bartram had their heads together in a nook at the far end of the open ground floor, obviously wrangling over business. Rosa sat slumped at one end of the kitchen table. She had been crying. Sarah-Kelly sat in an armchair, her back to the room, writing on her lap. From overhead came thumping and shouts of children dashing about.
Donald took a seat beside Rosa.
She said: “If they can hit Brent Cross, they can hit us here. Suppose there’s a radio in the next house?”
Sarah-Kelly yanked out a chair and sat between them. In contemptuous tones, she said: “That’s what they want you to think, you rabbit.”
Bartram ploughed up the length of the room, barging chairs out of the way. He swiped Sarah-Kelly across the back of the head so hard her chin almost hit the table. Donald sat rigid, furious at Bartram but reluctant to intervene in a family row.
“You will not speak to my wife like that.” As he was returning to business with Nightminster, he shouted back: “You have to be more than one of Banner’s babes to stay in this house.”
Sarah-Kelly kept her head down, teeth clenched, quivering with anger and futility. Minutes passed. She said nothing, so Donald coaxed:
“I would like to thank you for telling me about Lawrence. It’s highly unlikely I would have learned about his arrest but for you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I need details of what happened—and remember I know nothing at all about his life. We only learned he joined General Wardian when the school needed permission to send his records. For ten years we’ve heard not a whisper, despite our having written to him many times.”
Sarah-Kelly kept her voice low.
“He really hated you people. He was forever jeering quotes of your father and slagging you off for being such a greasy sycophant.”
“I can’t think of anything I did to make him so hostile, he’s nine years my junior, we barely knew each other.”
“From what I’ve seen of you, he was not wrong. You make a living in the butt-crack of the sovereigns.”
Donald paused before responding, quite aware that she was right and quite aware he must not appear to sympathise.
“I provide legal advice to those with the gold to pay for it. I have to make a living just like everyone else.”
Unfortunately, this was not the right thing to say. It fired a rant about the outrages of the sovereign system. He listened politely, finding little to disagree with, becoming impressed at how thoroughly she understood the “intellectual inescapability of balanced land”, although in her interpretation, it was that inescapability that condemned the sovereign system.
“The sovereigns claim they prevent the recrudescence of the Fatted Masses to protect Nature’s beauty, but there’s nothing new under the sun—they just want everything their own way. They’re blocking history and they have to go,” she said.
He noted the passion and rigid determination. TK could be right about the National Party being dangerous. The stupidity of General Wardian’s shelling of Brent Cross would hardly made it any safer. Bartram relieved his ears of further berating by yelling:
“Give the guy a rest, Skay. I can see from here his ears are bleeding. He can’t be yer average townie if he came out all on his own.”
Sarah-Kelly set her jaw and waited.
“To help Lawrence, I need to know how he came to be court-martialled,” Donald said. “Then I can put feelers through my town network to the Krossington clan. My experience of Tom Krossington is that he’s a fair man. If his citizens were involved in this business, he will do something about it.”
Sarah-Kelly finally came down from the clouds of ideology to the here and now.
“How did you check my story?” she asked.
“I can’t give details. A friend of a friend works at Northumberland Avenue.” This was the corporate HQ of General Wardian, situated in the Westminster district of the Central Enclave. “This person was able to check Lawrence’s personnel records, which showed he had been dishonourably dismissed.”
“What makes you so sure Lawrence is innocent?”
“Family intuition. People do not change much after a certain age. The defining trait of my brother was defiance. He was never a bully, a liar, or a thief.”
“And you think Mr Krossington will give a damn?”
“Yes. In any case, what have you to lose?”
“All right, go ahead, fire away.”
Donald gathered his thoughts, all too aware how instantly he would be in danger if he blurted out something he ought not to know.
“First of all, why did you only come to me recently, when Lawrence was sent to the Fog in the summer?”
“I wasted months pestering the National Party to appeal to the ultramarines. It’s a waste of time, the ultras don’t care.”
“What rank did Lawrence hold at the time of his arrest?”
“He was a cost-centre lieutenant. That’s one below account-captain. He was very young.”
“Who was his commanding officer?”
“That was Account-Captain Turner. He was clever, you could tell he saw the sovereign system as a racket from top to bottom, what he lacked was the guts to do anything about it. Still, he might help you.”
“How did you come to be working in Oban?”
“It’s a bit of a story… do you know what I mean by a talent court?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think you would. Well, last year the Talent Court of Krossington set up a marquee on the Brent Cross market place. I was so sick of my job—I was working at ZEEBRI adding up columns of numbers and checking stock. It was rotting my mind. So, I went in and took a test, all funny shapes and having to circle the right one. They told me later I got a score of 127, whatever that means. Seemingly I did well, because they asked me back to face a panel of officials, who grilled me to death about school, my work, people who could vouch for me. I felt like my life had been picked clean by the time they let me go. A month later, a messenger turned up at our gate with a passport. I was now citizen of the Lands of Krossington! I had to go to this place Oban I’d never heard of in my life. Christ, it seemed like I was going to the moon. They laid on a charabanc to take me and some others to the Port of Erith, where we boarded Krossington’s yacht, the Neptune. That was when I grasped just what a leap up I’d made. It’s another world. Everything on her gleamed—even the toilets. She absolutely tore along. You couldn’t stand on the deck because of the wind and spray. Mr Krossington put on a dance for us up in their part of the ship—he even danced with me! It was like I had a new family. Even despite all that happened, I don’t believe he knew about it. You can tell when people are straight up. He had a real air of being boss—not that he deserves what he has—he is quality though, I’ll give him that.”
She started work as a clerk in the trading department of Oban Castle. It was a large office, as the Mull and Morvern Estate produced monumental quantities of goods for the homeland of Krossington in the south.
“It was watching the fortune Krossington took off that landscape that made me think how the world was set up. How could one family take so much while the rest of us just watched?”
One day a big glory officer asked her on a date—completely out of the blue. She had been too surprised to say no. Everything she had heard about glory officers confirmed they were vain and corrupt. It was a surprise to find Lawrence held similarly contemptuous views to hers—and despised the corruption as much as she did. It amused them both to scandalise the petty society of the town.
She sighed, struggling to keep back her tears.
Then Lawrence vanished. She picked up a rumour he had been arrested. After furious pestering of the General Wardian HQ in Oban, she finally caught Turner out for a walk with his wife. The rumour was true. He told her Lawrence had been charged with corruption against the Krossingt
ons. The charges were very serious and they were getting more so as evidence came to light. A couple of days later, a squad of Krossington marines took her to the butler of Oban Castle. Certain documents missing from the office had been found in her flat. She must be gone from the town before dusk, else be barged to Glasgow as extracted infestation. She walked to the docks in the clothes she stood in and spent all her savings haggling a ticket on a shitty water tanker only going as far as Morecambe. Very luckily, she met someone there who knew the name Newman; but for that, she would still be in Morecambe earning God knew what kind of a living.
“Working on your back is what you’d be doing,” Bartram said. Nightminster and he had finished their business. They poured tankards of beer from a copper drum and pulled up chairs. Nightminster sat beside Sarah-Kelly and gave her a hug, kissing through her blonde hair. At such close range, Nightminster’s sheer physical size was phenomenal. His thighs were the size of the hounds on guard outside, the shoulders broad like a door. Sarah-Kelly tolerated him while in no way returning the affection.
So, thought Donald, here we have a story. Nightminster is chasing a woman half his age—but why? He has been intimate with the Newman family since the days of Jakub Newman, which means he must have watched Sarah-Kelly grow up “from crayons to perfume”, as the saying goes. Why make a move now, when Sarah-Kelly is searching for her lost love? Was this an older man’s folly the Newmans tolerated because they could not afford to lose his business?
Donald pushed the conversation on; it would be dark in an hour.
“What was Lawrence accused of?”
“He was found guilty of large scale of corruption against the Krossingtons and sentenced to eight years’ Night and Fog,” Sarah-Kelly said.
“Are you repeating what someone told you?”
“I was on my way to the docks, bag in hand, when this fat little merchant laughed across the promenade at me—he scurried right through all the wagons and trucks sneering all over his face. Those were pretty much his words. He said my lover-boy was gone for good. Did that bastard sound pleased about it.”
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