The Collective

by Lindsey Whitlock

  But now, from where he lay, dirty on his bed at the Blackwells’, it all seemed shabby. For weeks, Aelred had been in the Liberty jail. Badfish Creek had been in trouble. His family had been kicked off their land. People had been struggling for something that mattered.

  While Elwyn had been getting his photograph taken and practising speeches, Whim had become this whole other person. The sort of person who stands at the front of a crowd. The sort of person who casts light. It was her light that threw Elwyn’s life into such sharp relief. While everything else around him was dim and confused, Elwyn could see one thing clearly. He saw that Whim had done something real. Something of lasting value. And he and everything he was striving for was just a shadow in comparison. Less than a shadow.

  ‘You’re awake,’ his aunt said as she walked into the room, holding a cold cloth in her hand. She placed it on his forehead, removing the now-warm one that had been there. Looking around, Elwyn saw that there were bowls of water beside him, herbs and compresses. She sat on the stool beside the bed and checked his eyes and his pulse.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ Elwyn said.

  ‘The equine manager found you at the Rhoads’ stable after the riot. You were badly hurt,’ she said with her usual crispness. ‘The political tour has been postponed. There will be a speech at some point regarding the riot, and if you are well enough, they’ve requested your attendance. But I think you’d be a fool to sacrifice your health for someone else.’

  None of this seemed important to Elwyn in that moment. ‘Hestia. Is Hestia okay? And what happened to the protesters? Is the trial still going forward?’ Elwyn said, sitting up urgently, only to find his head swimming and his back aching. He winced and lay back. Piety adjusted things for him and answered in her usual methodical way.

  ‘All the Rhoads are safe. For such a large demonstration, the serious injuries have been few. Only the jail’s guards were seriously hurt, and that wasn’t due to the protesters – they say that one of the guards went insane and turned on the others. All in all, it was a rousing success for safety policy and procedure. Your uncle will be thrilled,’ she said with an unpleasant smile. ‘As for the trial, it seems the aim of this demonstration was to free the man from jail, and in that they have succeeded, though what hope they can have of keeping him out of court in the long term, I don’t know. It’s not my business.’

  Elwyn’s head was still spinning. The details blurred. He didn’t know what the time was; he wasn’t even sure of the day. He rolled over onto his side and tried to sit up, wincing. He stood on aching legs and made his way over to his desk, hunched like an old man. He opened the drawer, each movement aching and difficult, and pulled out his wallet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Piety asked.

  ‘What time is it?’ Elwyn said. ‘I need to catch a train…’ But he stopped speaking. He had opened his wallet and found it empty. His mind was so addled, at first he thought he wasn’t seeing right. He clumsily dug his fingers into the corners of the leather. ‘Someone’s stolen…’ he began, but couldn’t finish. His head was swimming and he had to lower himself to the ground.

  ‘Your money is safe,’ Piety said.

  Elwyn looked up at his aunt. ‘Safe?’

  ‘I know you think I’m without ideals or beliefs, but I’m not an unprincipled person. I still believe in honesty. Being true to oneself, true to one’s word. Long ago, I promised your mother that if I ever took you in, I would keep you safe. That is what I said, and so that is what I have done. No more, no less.’

  ‘…my letters…’ Elwyn said, holding his stomach and looking up at his aunt once again.

  ‘I was afraid you might do something rash. They were set aside for your safety. Just look at you now.’ Elwyn couldn’t speak, betrayal and nausea were so strong in his stomach. ‘Believe me, it wasn’t easy for me to stomach falling into the role of censor. I believe in openness in discourse. But I am bound to my word.’

  ‘Your word. You are bound,’ Elwyn said from where he sat on the ground, head resting against the cool wood of the desk. He shifted his body, wincing, then sighed. ‘I thought you and I were different. You liked to say no to the world, and I liked to say yes. But we’re actually the same. It’s all about us, isn’t it? All about my dreams. All about your doubts, your honour. We can’t see anything else. We can’t see anyone but ourselves, and what’s right in front of us,’ Elwyn snorted.

  There was the bitter taste of bile in Elwyn’s mouth, the taste of self-disgust. His aunt was quiet as Elwyn used the desk to raise himself up to standing. With effort, he straightened his back, lifted his chest and chin. Stiffly he walked out of his room, down the clock-laden hall, into the foyer and out of the front door. Stiffly, painfully, he walked the familiar way to the Rhoad house. Elwyn didn’t have to think; his feet knew the path well. The sky was overcast. Doors and windows were closed and shuttered. The Rhoad house, like the town below it, was very quiet. Elwyn went to the back door, but the housekeeper wasn’t there, and nor was the cook.

  ‘Hestia?’ Elwyn called out as he entered the dining room, then the main hall. His ribs hurt as he spoke. A ripple of worry ran down his legs, and again his stomach turned. But then he heard a sound from Rhoad’s private office.

  The door was ajar. And in the middle of it was Hestia. Papers scattered and flew around her as she rifled through a box of receipts, the dull light of a grey day casting a strange tone over the scene.

  When she heard Elwyn’s footsteps, Hestia looked up with a directness and fierceness unusual even for her. ‘Do you believe it? What your friend said about my father seizing land?’ Hestia challenged.

  ‘I believe everything Whim says,’ Elwyn said, his heart in his throat as he spoke.

  ‘I believe her, too,’ Hestia said, turning back to the papers. She handed Elwyn a stack of messy forms and maps. As she did, her eyes scanned his battered appearance. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked gravely.

  ‘I’m okay. I came here because I’m going home,’ Elwyn said. ‘I want you to come with me.’

  ‘Elwyn, look at the papers,’ she said.

  ‘What are they?’ Elwyn said, scanning words of a contract.

  ‘It’s everything. Everything I found so far anyway. Letters from local magistrates requesting financial rewards for their cooperation. Receipts for relocation funds. Plans for the mine. Contracts with demolition workers. A glass-factory floor plan. My father illegally used a loophole to seize the land. He said the Foresters’ being there was dangerous to “the progress of the Collective”. He’d done it before, too, and I don’t know how he’s gotten away with it. It would never hold up in court. Meanwhile, he’s putting a sand mine where your town was. He has contracts with builders all over the Collective for glass, beginning production at the start of next year. And look. He has prospective overseas contracts, too, contingent on his Chancellorship and the Collective opening up to trade. The profit margins selling abroad are huge. Forester labour is so cheap.’ Elwyn read as Hestia explained, rubbing his shoulder where it ached. ‘It’s all here. Written in business terms, as if people were just any other resource. The relocation funds are a tiny fraction of the expense. They intentionally made the funds just large enough to tempt very poor people, but still not enough to get them off on the right foot. They want people to come back. To come back and work in the mines.’

  Elwyn looked up at her. The reality of it sank in through his skin.

  ‘They’re going to tear down your hometown, Elwyn. There will be nothing left. Less than nothing. A hole in the ground.’

  Then a sound echoed through the quiet house. Hestia and Elwyn froze. The front door opened and slammed shut.

  ‘Well, that was a waste of time.’ Rhoad’s voice echoed through the house, uncharacteristically erratic.

  ‘He was at a meeting at the city hall about security and enforcement,’ Hestia whispered, quietly gathering papers. ‘I didn’t expect them home so early.’

  ‘That insufferable Blackwell. Thinks the letter of t
he law is the word of God. I’ve never in my life heard someone say the words “proper procedure” so often. These people will be nicely situated at some wilderness hideout by the time the “proper procedures” are done to document the crime. I would think he was trying to help them if I hadn’t met men in love with bureaucracy before. It’s stupidity.’

  ‘I’m getting a drink,’ muttered a rattled-sounding Letitia Rhoad.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ Rhoad said. ‘People are terrified. You need to be at your best. The radiant, glistening face of the future.’

  ‘And you think I am not terrified? I, a woman born into education, privilege… I had to hide in the cellar with the servants! It’s an uprising!’

  ‘Uprising!’ Rhoad scoffed. ‘It’s just poor people trying to make themselves feel in control. It will work for a while, and folks will think that things have changed. But things never change, Letitia. Do you hear me? Things never change. Not for them.’

  ‘What do I have to look good for anyway?’ Letitia said, tremulous, with the clink of the decanter opening. ‘The tour is postponed. The press is focused on the riot. You’ve sunk our fortune into this campaign, and now that campaign is over.’

  ‘It is NOT OVER,’ Rhoad boomed. His voice echoed down the shimmering halls. Elwyn had never heard Rhoad so much as raise his voice, and the effect made the hairs on the back of his neck stand. ‘You will put your drink down. Take a bath, calm your nerves. Then you will put on one of your many beautiful dresses. Your hairdresser will come in to do your hair in one of the many becoming ways it is done. And we will go out and speak to the people – you, me, Hestia and Elwyn, if he looks good enough for the camera. I’ve already started making the calls. There will be photographers. Dozens of photographers. We will flood the papers with our image and with our words. Our faces, your face, will be on the front of every newspaper. Then we’ll leave on tour, and there will be more pictures, and more words for the papers. We will change the story people are telling. We will change it. We will change everything.’

  ‘But aren’t you worried that they’ll be back? These people… they have no values, nothing to lose. They just want to take from us what we’ve earned, what our parents and grandparents have earned…’

  ‘Take a bath,’ Rhoad said more quietly, but not gently. ‘Calm your nerves.’ And they could hear footsteps going up the stairs, and after those faded, there was the clink of the decanter, the pouring of a drink.

  Hestia was moving quickly and quietly, like the fierce hummingbird she had first reminded Elwyn of, and Elwyn tried clumsily to help her, but movement was painful.

  ‘Hide these papers,’ Hestia said, nodding to the open window. Elwyn leant out and secured the stack of paper with a rock below the concealing branches of a bush. When he got back in, the room was almost clear and Rhoad’s approaching footsteps could be heard in the hall. The footsteps reminded him of Rhoad walking down towards the protesters, and of Hestia being dragged away.

  Perhaps Elwyn should have been afraid in that moment. Rhoad was not an innocent man, and Elwyn had more than ever to lose. But anger pulsed in his veins. Elwyn wanted to look Rhoad in the eye. Rhoad: the man Elwyn had admired so intensely. The man who was destroying Elwyn’s home.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Hestia said, then the door swung open. Elwyn turned, ready to face Rhoad with his head high. When Rhoad’s eyes met Elwyn, they flashed for a moment with something like disgust. Then they returned to their usual evenness.

  ‘What are you doing in my office?’ Rhoad said. They didn’t answer. Elwyn felt his face growing red with the anger that was growing in him.

  For a moment, the room was completely quiet. The three of them stood looking at one another. The only sound was a mosquito that had flown in through the open window. For a moment, that was what Elwyn could hear, that and his own rising pulse. The buzzing of the mosquito grew louder as it neared them, drawn by the smell of human breath and blood in the air.

  ‘Do you know about the First War, Elwyn? The “Revolutionary War”, as it was called?’ Rhoad spoke into the silence. The mosquito buzzed around his head, but he kept his eyes glued to his daughter and Elwyn. Rhoad raised his arm; the bare skin below rolled-up sleeves was pale.

  ‘I’ve had an education,’ Elwyn said. Hestia was watching her father carefully, the way a cat watches and waits.

  ‘Before there was a Collective, this country was a colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Britain was the centre of civilisation, and the strongest military power in the world. It went on to colonise half the world. But these thirteen backwater colonies were able to throw it off. Do you know why?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elwyn said, feeling the heat in his own face as he spoke. ‘People loved and believed in something and acted on that love.’

  ‘Wrong. It was Anopheles quadrimaculatus. The malarial mosquito.’ The mosquito had landed on Rhoad’s arm and was beginning to swell with blood. ‘Such a small, inconsequential thing. A nuisance. But it overthrew an empire. The settlers had developed resistance to diseases that the British had not. A great power fell. A legacy unravelled.’

  ‘Or perhaps it was the British themselves at fault for their fall,’ Hestia said, full of animation. ‘For planting the seed of slavery and profiting from it. For making false promises to the tribes and kingdoms that already had claim to the land. For being leaders that serve their own interests, not the interests of the powerless.’

  ‘Hush, Hestia, and for once in your life listen!’ Rhoad yelled, purpling. He turned back to Elwyn. ‘After the British left, the American colonists ran into their own problems. They had plans for a little empire of their own. “Manifest Destiny”, they called it. But always the insects had their way of pushing back: disease, blindness, death.’ The mosquito on Rhoad’s arm was getting larger and larger. Elwyn watched, frozen in rage and transfixed. ‘The smallest things can buck a civilisation if you don’t attend to them.’

  Rhoad’s voice trailed off as the mosquito lifted its proboscis. The insect rose to fly, heavy with blood. But Rhoad lifted the arm that the mosquito had bitten, and without looking caught the mosquito in his hand. He held his fist out towards Elwyn. Then opened it. His palm was stained red. But Rhoad’s face was now cool and composed. Ready to give a speech. Ready to have his picture taken.

  ‘Understand, Hestia, Elwyn, I’m not a stupid man. I have eyes everywhere. I can protect those who are loyal to me, and I can destroy those who aren’t. Consider this a reminder,’ Rhoad said. ‘You won’t be getting another.’

  Hestia lifted her chin.

  ‘I will not be threatened,’ she said. Her father brushed the mosquito’s tiny body from his hand. ‘Least of all by my own father.’

  ‘I’ve rebooked the campaign tour. It will go on as originally planned, almost exactly. But in light of recent events, we’ll be delivering a speech here in Liberty tomorrow morning before we go. You and I will both speak, Elwyn. Our speech-writers are already at work on what we will say. It will be a pivotal moment, not just for this campaign, but the country. We will be the face of a hopeful future in these dark times.’ Then he looked at Elwyn more deliberately, in a way that surprised him. ‘We really are the face of the future, you and I, Elwyn. My daughter is young and headstrong and naturally doubts all I say. But you should know that for me this is not a game. I don’t seek prominence or fortune – both those things I have. I seek leadership because this country is mired in old prejudices, old failures, old habits. And I know how to get us out.’

  Hestia scoffed at this, but Elwyn didn’t. It seemed possible to him that what Rhoad had said was true; maybe his intentions weren’t just self-serving. It made no difference. Intentions never mattered much to Elwyn. As he was led to the parlour, where jumpy-looking speech-writers sat working, he kept thinking about that pile of papers and what it meant for him, what it meant for the Collective. Think about what it means for the powerful to deceive the people they serve.

  Elwyn knew what he had to do.

  CHAPTER
30

  The Collective

  ELWYN SPENT THE DAY with the Rhoads, closely supervised. Again and again they went over the speech Elwyn was to give, memorising it, adjusting the tone. In the afternoon, Elwyn fell asleep on the sofa when he was supposed to be listening to tweaks being made to the campaign trip. The changes didn’t matter to Elwyn because he knew he wouldn’t be going on that tour. He wasn’t even sure he would be alive. His future seemed very tenuous. In those few moments of sleep, Elwyn dreamt the glistening room they worked in collapsed and he had to dig himself out of gilded rubble and broken glass. He woke with a jolt, but no one asked him if he was all right. Afterwards, they had an early dinner and the meal was silent.

  Elwyn was led to the same guest room where he had spent the first night with the Rhoads. The room had looked so beautiful to him then, but seeing it again now made him sad. Elwyn missed the sound of his brothers snoring and turning in their sleep. He missed the sound of crickets and the creek. He worried he would never hear them again. The words he was going to say the next day went over and over in his mind as he drifted in and out of uneasy sleep.

  ‘I have them,’ Hestia whispered to Elwyn on their way to the car the next morning. That was all they were able to say to one another. They were shunted apart into different doors of the sleek black car. It was only two miles from the Rhoad house to the centre of Liberty – driving such a short distance was an extravagance that would have once thrilled Elwyn. But now he couldn’t shake the feeling that they took the car so Rhoad could keep them. Rhoad’s gaze, steely as the sky that hovered above them, didn’t leave Elwyn.

  In the city centre, the stage was set with a podium, and the reporters stood milling around it. The buzz of adrenalin from the protest was still in the air. People were gathered, talking in heightened tones about where they were when the jail was stormed, where they thought the gunman might be, what they thought would happen next.