Chalcot Crescent (29 page)

‘I did my best to love Amos but it was difficult.’ Victor had gone into whining mode. It can be difficult to respect men. I could see Polly’s point. I had quite liked Victor but now I could see what Venetia had to put up, to get to the Grade 1 CiviStore, to get both of her boys housed – Amos, out of Anon the artist, and Ethan, out of Karl, my husband.

‘I had my career to think about,’ he moaned on. ‘That prison sentence – he brought that on himself to get at me, I’ll swear he did. Like posh girls take up with rough trade, to annoy their parents. And Henry – Henry used me to fight his way up in NIFE. I got him the job out of the kindness of my heart. NUG Human Resources warned me against him: the graphologists’ report was very negative indeed, but I overruled them. Venetia insisted. He was Ethan’s big brother, after all.’

So he knew that too.

‘I can accept that. But Ethan? I loved him like my own. My own son did this to me. Brought me here by force, touched me with hands that seemed to hate me. How do you explain that, Gran?’

Perhaps Polly had been right. Perhaps Victor beat up Venetia from time to time and Ethan resented it. Saul had sworn he loved Doreen, when she came to me with a broken nose and took up
residence on my sofa until Karl threw her out, and I think Saul did. And she loved him. People are very odd.

I said Ethan might be a little mad. Neurological research suggested that in the schizophrenic brain the impulse to love and the impulse to hate were too closely linked, and there could be slippage.

‘Reductionist twaddle,’ he said. That was rich, coming from a scientist.

I asked him how his predecessor had died.

‘Of a heart attack,’ he said, sounding so surprised that I believed him. ‘Why do you ask? He ate too much real meat. It’s freely available in the Grade 1 CiviStores. I’m trying to get it stopped.’ And he told me that life expectancy outside NUG was higher than it was inside because of unhealthy eating habits. Real coffee and so on.

I asked him what he would do if he ever got out of here. He said he would move the family down to Whitehall, where there was proper security. He had just stepped into his car. Ethan had been driving, and had taken him to this dump where the others had been waiting. He would never feel safe getting into a Ministry car again. He would walk to work. He didn’t care what Venetia said. It had been Venetia’s insistence that they stayed in Muswell Hill. She liked the house. High ground inspired her. It had proved alarmingly expensive and the Committee had shaken their heads, but tried to get what benefit they could from it. Family man, all that. The public face of NUG. He’d managed to keep Amos out of the picture and of course they didn’t know about Ethan, that was a baby too far –

‘They probably know everything,’ I said. ‘They’ll have the place bugged. They have most of us bugged.’

‘That can’t be true,’ he said, but turned quite pale. Like many
scientists, many left-brainers, he was naive to the point of stupidity. They used him as Henry used him, as my daughter Venetia used him, to their advantage. I wondered if it was better for the country to be governed by stupid men like Victor or men of principle like Henry. I thought Victor won on points.

‘When you say family, Victor,’ I asked, ‘who do you mean? What are you going to do about Amos, Ethan, Henry and, if Ethan gets it together with her, Amy?’ What would he do about the snakes in his bosom to stop them wriggling around?

He said he would see they got treatment. NUG had excellent therapeutic services for Grade 1 families. I asked if the treatment included pushing family members off platforms or running them down when they were out shopping, and he looked so baffled. I thought it probably did not. I thought Polly was simply feeling guilty about a lot of things and imagined aggressors where none existed. She is my daughter, after all. The capacity to invent must surely surface from time to time.

I said to him, but Victor, if what I think is happening is, if they have got you imprisoned here not because they hate you but as a negotiating ploy for when Henry stages a coup and storms the heights of Muswell Hill, unseats NUG and sets up an alternative government, with the support of half a million armed CiviSecure teenagers, what then?

‘This is not a film,’ Victor said, eventually. ‘This is not the kind of thing that happens.’

‘Victor,’ I said. ‘This is a new world we’re in, entirely. There are no precedents.’

He replied that he wanted to pee. I could have said, ‘then do,’ but my maternal urge was still there. He had to put up with me finding a bowl, unzipping his fly, dragging out his limp penis, and
holding it while he used it. I reflected on how this pathetic piece of flesh in the possession of men makes so much difference to so many lives.

I emptied the bowl down the sink – a yellow and pungent stream. Victor did not drink enough. Venetia should make sure that he did. The water was off but Redpeace had left a half bottle of beer behind, so keen were they on revolution, and I used that to rinse out bowl and sink. My mother, always one to rise to eventualities, would have done the same.

I made a decision, as does a Booker Chairperson when the vote is split between two possible winners. The top judge, the fifth, weighs up the judges, not the book, and tilts the weight of judgment accordingly. The desire to hide my head under the blankets and sleep the rest of my life away was very great, yet to do nothing was not, when it came to it, an option. In favour of a coup was the end of NUG, its humourless bossiness, its endless interference. Against the coup – well, the devil you know tends to be better than the one you don’t. There is nothing in the natural world, other than our hopes, that suggests that if one thing is bad there must be a balancing good. Yet you have to hope – or what kind of person are you? What tipped the balance, it seemed, was family. Bloodless revolutions usually end up very bloody indeed. Victor as a hostage was bound to wind up dead, having provoked both sides to irrationality. Friendly fire from CiviSecure would like as not get my grandchildren and their mother too. CiviSecure were a frightening lot. At least under NUG we were all still alive, ate, and had shoes. I went with NUG.

I did what it was so simple to do. I got a cushion to shield my arm, and broke a window that looked out over the Crescent. I put my head out and in a voice once so strong but now lamentably shrill
and weak I called out to the CiviCam, ‘Help, help, we have been kidnapped.’

Then I went back to Victor and pulled up his zip, to protect his dignity, and we waited for rescue.

In spite of his frequent Friday visits to Muswell Hill, Henry had failed to take much notice of its topography. He had travelled there only by car. Ethan was in the habit of giving his half-brother a lift up from Hunter’s Alley, from where he had been organizing the New Republic. A good meal is often hard to find, especially for a busy revolutionary, and Venetia could always be relied upon to provide one. A proper sit-down meal with many courses had been a feature of Henry’s grandmother’s household in Ireland, and a man always relishes a comforting return to culinary childhood. The visits had also, of course, enabled Henry to understand the configurations of the house as it grew around him, its security arrangements and its communication systems. ‘Victor’s Palace’, as it had become known down at NIFE, was rumoured to be part of NUG’s new headquarters. Whitehall had survived the floods of 2012 but might not be so lucky next time. The whole government establishment, bureaucracy, nutritional labs, supply depots and all, would have to move to higher ground.

It was Henry’s plan to establish his forces – the Jokers and such CiviSecure guards as had come over to his side, some two thousand men and women in all – in the Tube lines, and on a given signal to take them over forcibly but peacefully. The New Republic was to be responsible for as little bloodshed as possible. The triumphant forces
were to make their way from stations all over London to Muswell Hill Underground, there to muster, and converge on Grand Avenue. Victor was to be held in a secret location to serve as a hostage in negotiations. The rallying call to action, when it flashed up on mobiles up and down the city, was
To the Batmobile!

But warned in time that an attempt was being made to seize the Muswell Hill heights, loyal NUG stalwarts easily beat back the invaders, using new vehicle-mounted CiviCalm sprayhoses, which induced extreme nausea in anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. Poor Venetia, for one, had her kitchen door burst open by a couple of hideously masked NUGIntel officials who tried, for her own good, to put a gas mask on her. She declined to wear the unsightly thing, and as a result suffered severe bruising, but, worse, had a whiff of the gas, which kept her in bed vomiting for days.

Henry’s rebels might well have won the day, but, finding there was no such station as Muswell Hill, were obliged to make for Highgate, Bounds Green or East Finchley stations instead, and, exhausted by the long, hot walk up the hill, straggled to the meeting point. They were not there in force when Henry needed them. There was a moment when they could have taken over the hoses and gassed the enemy rather than themselves, but the moment was lost. The New Model Army of the New Republic limped down the hill again, boots splashing in vomit.

Meanwhile, a proportion of those loyal to NUG – and during the skirmish many decided to rejoin the winning side – had been shuttled in CiviSecure helicopters to help restore order at the Banqueting Hall. Amos, Ethan and Amy, leading a cell of activists who had secretly infiltrated NIFE and other NUG departments over the last year, had occupied the building.

Little resistance had been offered. Transport, Registry and Lab
staff had lately become seedbeds of discontent: a good 30 per cent, it transpired, had been turned. Word had got round – or indeed been deliberately spread – that a lab worker had recognized his deceased grandmother’s ring on what looked like an elderly human hand as it was sucked into the mixer from which DNA was extracted. Another was said to have recognized the hennaed pigtail of Brass Number Three (in whose heart attack no-one quite believed) under a brain-dissection slab. It was rumoured that a happily married chauffeur had been ordered into the back of his stretch limo to provide an extra penis at an orgy. Ph.Ds in psychoanalytical studies were apparently being handed out gratis to favoured Committee members. Worse, access to the CiviStores was being limited to all but the most senior grades, and acorn coffee served in the canteens as a matter of course. And no-one had had a rise for two years.

By the time CiviSecure arrived, to find doors and windows barricaded, and the strikers inside, activists had the sluices and water supplies to the labs cut off. But the moans that issued from the life broth tanks – though probably only the sounds of suction and plumbing – as the water drained were enough to persuade the tender-hearted to grapple with the hard-hearted, and the former won by a good majority. Water supplies were resumed. News came down that the Muswell Hill attack had failed. Heart and zest fizzled out of the occupation. The barricades were taken down and CiviSecure entered in.

Victor appeared briefly in person, and Top Brasses Numbers One and Two called a meeting in the canteen, and addressed the strikers:
NUG – Making Peaceful Choices Easier
. Workers were promised that real coffee would be back on the menu and a 5 per cent wage increase, backdated three months, would be granted.

So the coup dissolved without bloodshed. The ringleaders were identified and led away. Life at NUG continued as normal as all prepared for a move up the hill to where the air was fresher and cleaner. A state of emergency was, however, declared and elections put off for the time being.

No end indeed to the surprises. What NUG possesses in great measure is gratitude. Now there’s a turn-up for the books. They even gave me an award lately, a framed certificate on which was inscribed: ‘For contributing to the assuagement of misunderstandings within the community.’ A carpenter arrived to hang it on the wall: a carer to put the flowers in water.

NUG are grateful to have their Victor back. Why I cannot make out, but there it is: I think they have taken a leaf out of the New Republic’s book and are moving towards abolishing the monarchy. It won’t be long before Victor is made President, a post where dignity and little else is required. He appears on TV from time to time, wearing suits that are ever more expensive, smiling and benign, explaining the necessity of some new restriction on our consumption or freedoms.

I try not to think of his helpless cock: it makes me laugh. I try not to think of Amos and his ‘necessity is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves’ because it makes me cry, being true. Victor and Venetia and Mervyn the Dull have moved up to a house in Belgravia, where I believe the attics have been opened out to give Venetia a good northern light for her studio. I believe she is moving from acrylics to watercolours.

I am living in NUG’s Regent’s Park therapeutic community, in
their ‘Protected Housing for Deserving Seniors’ facility. It is a cluster of rather ugly but mostly comfortable bungalows in what was once Queen Mary’s Rose Garden. I live with no stairs and all mod cons. We get broadband, electricity and water twenty-four/seven. I am very happy.

Now I am in a different place, having been wrenched forcibly from the Crescent, the marriage to Karl and its attendant problems have faded into the past. Staying in the Crescent after the divorce, which I thought so clever, was probably the worst thing I ever did. I had nailed myself into the past. New ways of life demand new homes. NUG offer to replace my knees, and even to tighten my vocal cords so my voice returns to its former strength and youth. This they can do, apparently. I am thinking about it. The ‘Deserving Seniors’ get an automatic chance of being cloned, but I am not sure I would wish to inflict myself on another human being.

When CiviSecure arrived with their sirens, vans and armaments to rescue Victor they broke down all the front doors at my end of the Crescent just to be on the safe side, though they promised to make good and repaint, and even spend money restoring the whole Crescent to its former glory. Indeed, I heard an official remark that it was a pretty street and would make good housing for NUG Grade 2s. I still own my house. My mortgage and store-card debts have been repaid. I have a civil pension that is more than enough for my needs. For the time being I prefer to stay where I am, and am welcome to. Death no longer seems so inviting.