Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  She slept less, was more and more taken in by her project. Robert sensed, but couldn’t entirely explain or understand, the changes in her. He started to worry. She started to worry about the ways in which he worried. She needed a release. By this point, she had other vectors of expression. Everybody, she told herself as she logged into the comments section of The Command Line for the first time, needed a safety valve. Every partner needed things they kept veiled for fear of feeling subsumed.

  The justification was simple, but the practice was far more complicated. She had reckoned without Robert’s insecurity, which he kept concealed beneath his idealism, his forthrightness. She had failed to calculate the extent to which Julia Benjamin’s comments would come to preoccupy him, the ways in which he would start to consider her responses before he even wrote anything. His columns became subtly more strident, his voice a shade more rigid. A sense of opposition emerged, and, to Jess’s dismay, revealed itself to be something she needed, a friction that was lacking elsewhere.

  Now, daily, whether she was hooked up at Nodem, marshalling the avatars she’d once imagined as troops, or driving home, reflecting on what she’d done, or lying awake at night, peopling the image of her own face with the imagined faces of her creations, Jess felt anything but powerful. She felt, instead, dissipated, fragmented, diluted. Something in her, be it energy or power or basic motivational force, was finite, and she had not doubled it but divided it, again and again, until she felt scattered and disparate and no longer in command of her gathered selves. This, she thought, was what men did to you. No, not every woman in the country had taken quite such drastic measures, but all of them, as far as she could see, used self-division to approximate completeness. You were this woman at work. You were this woman at home. You were this woman in bed. All your energy was expended in compartmentalisation. The power required to be whole was diluted.

  She looked up at Robert. He was running his fork across the surface of his plate, scooping up what remained of the sauce. As if sensing her looking at him, he glanced up and smiled.

  ‘We should go,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  *

  In the post-tech park era people half-jokingly referred to as Edmundsbury 2.0, change was abundant. Touting for planning permission in a town not yet consenting to their arrival, Green had trumpeted their own efficiency, and played up the changes they could effect. Sweeteners had been offered and accepted: new cabling, a town-wide private network, increased download speeds, heightened security. Convenience and modernity had won out over suspicion. Now, though, discomfort had crept back in. The aftermath of some intangible shift was in the air. It was something people talked about at odd hours: in the early morning after a night of drinking, at the end of a particularly reflective meal as the bill was being settled. The word uncanny was bandied around a lot. Visible change was no longer the issue. The unease stemmed from the unseen, from the near-invisible yet perfectly measurable changes Edmundsbury’s environment had undergone. Keen to invest in schemes that might not have brought any financial return but which promised to accrue ideological interest, Green had offered to help the town meet its goal of becoming more environmentally sound. The project was heavily publicised, but the details were not. How many people in Edmundsbury were therefore conscious of the fact that the illumination emitted from their once-familiar street lights had shifted ever so slightly along the spectrum? Was anyone aware, as Jess was, that the direction of this shift was, to a fractional but nonetheless important degree, closer to full-spectrum daylight, meaning that, almost undetectably, anyone out walking after dark was subject to a micro-alteration of their circadian state?

  Even when changes were digital, the effect, Jess knew, could be physical. Complaints about traffic had increased by almost two hundred per cent. Local opinion held that the arrival of the tech park had led to the arrival of more people, which had led in turn to greater congestion on the roads – an assumption that clearly had at least some basis in reality. But plotted on a graph, the increase in internet speeds and the increase in traffic complaints could practically be overlaid onto each other. People’s collective capacity for patience had decreased in inverse proportion to their expectation of immediacy.

  As she and Robert walked towards the town centre, Jess considered the way in which all of these individually small and almost unnoticeable changes in experience added up to a seismic shift in consciousness. Around her, perfectly unaware people traversed pools of altered light, their senses tuned to new pitches of speed and immediacy. Perhaps, she thought, their heart rates were infinitesimally accelerated, their pupils micro-dilated, their breathing a quarter of a respiration faster and shallower. Perhaps all these adaptations, in what they saw and how they saw it, added up to something irreversible, evolutionary. Or perhaps the creeping change responsible for Edmundsbury’s collective, semi-conscious unease was nothing more than the digital mimicry of an organic inevitability. Progress was always present; it was only its speed that changed: from faster than light down to glacial, imperceptible to vertigo-inducing. Nothing was ever stable; nothing was ever at rest.

  And this was just the physical, the tangible. In the world of feelings and perceptions, drift was endemic. Look at Robert, she thought, walking with his hand in hers. Once, such a statement would have seemed excessive, unnecessary. Now, there was something vital about it, as if it was their own little resistance to time’s effects, their gloss on the countercurrents beneath and around them.

  They had turned out of their suburban street and were now walking along the main road that led into the town centre. Half of Edmundsbury, it seemed, had made it out for the show. The atmosphere was both edgy and excited. Nervous chatter filled the streets.

  Edmundsbury’s so-called historic but now blandly small-town centre, a short walk from Jess and Robert’s terraced house, was in many ways the epicentre of the peripheral changes that orbited it. Once home to a fruit and livestock market, it was now fenced in by coffee chains and panini outlets. No-one went into town to shop any more. They went there to drink coffee and eat – a vague café culture which at least seemed focused on the idea that a town’s ethos should centre more on the gathering together of people than the availability of purchasable goods. But when you scratched the surface, things were effectively the same: a culture of expenditure, a town-life predicated on the separation of people from their money.

  The sight of the town square filled with people gave rise to the sensation that whatever was happening was, in some as yet uncategorised way, significant. Regular boundaries and uses of public space were temporarily suspended. There was a pointed but thus far non-invasive police presence. Officers stood at the edges of the small crowd, chatting and eyeing those assembling with a casual, almost paternal gaze.

  ‘Right,’ said Robert as they wandered over to the edge of the gathering and came to a stop. ‘What now?’

  Jess shrugged. ‘Wait, I suppose.’

  He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her towards him. She felt herself resisting, then, embarrassed by her own reluctance, relenting, softening into him.

  ‘When was the last time we were out like this?’ she said.

  He frowned. ‘Last night?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘No, like out. Like this. Like looking at fireworks or Christmas lights or something.’

  ‘You think that’s what this will be like?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But still.’

  Edmundsbury’s clock tower, which didn’t so much loom over the square as perch squatly a little way above it, began to chime. As it did so, a black transit van with tinted windows rounded the corner and, allowing time for the small crowd to part, drove into the middle of the square and sat with its engine idling. For what felt like a lengthy few seconds nothing happened. The tension, Jess noted, was palpable, and people were, consciously or unconsciously, backing away from the vehicle. Jess did not feel particularly concerned. Far from being sinister, the van wa
s actually, to Jess, a sign that something carefully considered was going on. It was too common a signifier – a vehicle not for a covert military team or highly organised terror cell but instead for a group of people who revelled in the idea that they might be mistaken for one of those things. It was the tinted windows, she thought, and the fact that they’d chosen a black van as opposed to a white one. For anyone conducting some kind of hostile act from which they hoped to escape, the primary concern would have been to select a vehicle that would blend in on the roads. This shiny black monstrosity would stick out a mile, suggesting that sticking out a mile was exactly what it was supposed to do.

  It was difficult to tell whether the crowd was becoming more anxious during the slight delay, or if in fact it had caused people to relax. There was almost, Jess sensed, a slight feeling of impatience, as if everyone was waiting for the event to buffer and load.

  She was about to say something to Robert when the rear doors of the van opened and five people wearing identical masks and office garb to the man at the party climbed out. They gestured to the crowd to move back, and the crowd, inexplicably obedient, obeyed. The power balance was not lost on Jess. This was not an anarchist gesture. This was a group of people for whom existing dynamics of authority were largely assumed. Even if they might have felt themselves to be outsiders, their marshalling of the crowd demonstrated that they still sought a power they envied in others.

  They arranged the crowd at the front of the van, facing towards and past it. The back doors of the van were open and pointing away from the crowd. Everyone and everything were now directed towards the large expanse of pale wall that formed the top half of a café overlooking the northern end of the square. The angle of the building’s roof meant that it had skylights rather than standard windows, leaving the upper wall as an unbroken rectangular expanse of whitewashed facade perfectly proportioned to become exactly what the men in masks now made of it: a cinema screen.

  Jess, like the rest of the crowd, was at the front end of the van, and so couldn’t see inside it, but the moment the familiar glow lit up the white space it was clear that the van housed a powerful projector. The men outside the van now numbered four. They arranged themselves two on each side of the vehicle, facing the crowd, their backs to the unfolding projection. They carried nothing, and something about their stance and the way they flanked the van implied an absence, as if weaponry were suggested but not present. She wondered if this was deliberate, or just the result of profound cultural association. It was an uncomfortable sensation, realising you’d noticed the absence of guns. Guns, surely, should be noticeable only when present?

  On the wall behind the men, a word appeared: black, sans-serif, stark in the sharp light on the bare white wall.

  Edmundsbury:

  It remained for several seconds. Then, it was replaced by an image: full colour, but grainy and low-res, shot in weak living-room light, the camera not quite straight. It was of a young woman, kneeling on all fours on a sofa, naked, her rear towards the camera, her hand reaching back through her legs to her vagina. After maybe ten or so seconds, the image disappeared and was replaced by text.

  We are The Griefers.

  This was in turn replaced by another image: a woman in what looked to be her late teens, leaning over a sink, wearing nothing but a G-string, her right hand covering her breasts, her left hand holding her mobile phone, its camera pointed at the mirror, the starburst of flash cutting across her eyes and obscuring her face.

  We want to ask you:

  Another image, this time of a man, or rather, most of a man. His head was out of shot. His trousers were round his knees, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal a thatch of chest hair and a generous expanse of stomach. In the centre of the image was his erection, his right hand gripping it with unnecessary force, the veins on his arm standing out in relief, the head of his cock bulging out of the top of his fist.

  What don’t you want to share?

  People in the crowd were starting to mutter. If this was some sort of art piece, they seemed to feel, it was in bad taste. If it was real, it was in worse taste.

  The next image was of an email, the address of both sender and recipient crudely redacted with a red, photoshopped smear. Some of the text had been blurred but in the centre a single line stood out in relief: no-one will ever find out. The image dissolved in a slow fade, replaced by a screenshot of a bank account – the details again bluntly struck through with digital red pen, only the transactions visible. The amounts, Jess noted, were in the tens of thousands. This time the text appeared over the image:

  Remember, Edmundsbury …

  As it did so, the thick red lines across the bank details began to erase themselves, right to left. Just as a few letters became visible beneath, the image was replaced by the preceding one, the email, on which the red lines were again creeping off the page, revealing the back half of the redacted addresses. This was in turn replaced, quickly, before any names besides generic email services could be seen, by the erection image, only now the camera was edging upwards, with more of the man’s face becoming visible, only for the image to vanish at the last moment, dissolving into the bathroom selfie, in which, now, the light from the flash was fading, airbrushed in real time, the woman’s eyes becoming visible. Finally, the first image showed itself again: the kneeling woman, anonymous unless you happened to know her intimately, or unless you happened to follow the camera as it zoomed in, over her backside and shoulder, towards a mirror that Jess had not originally noticed, in which, faint and small, her face could almost be made out …

  The image vanished. In its place, in close-up, filling the screen, a series of un-redacted profile pictures faded into one another. One or two looked familiar. Someone in the crowd shouted, ‘That’s me,’ and someone else shouted, ‘That’s my wife.’ Tight red squares appeared on the images, isolating the faces, cropping them, blowing them up. The fade-speed increased, until the images no longer quite seemed to be replacing each other but instead becoming each other, each face morphing to accommodate the next. As the speed increased, the impression was of a blur of faces, until the change from image to image was undetectable, the speed registering only as humming visual static, the shifting faces now essentially stable, one face, staring out at the crowd: the face of the masks worn by the men in the van. Finally, over the top of it, flashing white before the screen went black, came the statement Jess was by now expecting:

  We are your face.

  And then the projector snapped off. The men climbed back inside the van. The rear doors slammed shut. The van drove calmly away.

  Jess slipped her hand from Robert’s and rubbed her eyes, returning to herself after some moments away. When she blinked and looked at Robert, he was massaging his fingers, kneading away the force of her grip.

  0010

  Being Hugo Bennington, Hugo liked to say, was a tough job, but someone had to do it. For a while he’d said dirty job, but Teddy, his right-hand man and advisor in all things presentational, had cautioned him against the word.

  Hugo operated in a complicated state of balance. His primary task was to be outspoken, but his other task was to watch what he said. Hence: being Hugo Bennington was a tough job. Quite whether anyone had to do it was more open to question. Hugo had, on many occasions, given quite serious thought to not doing it at all. But you couldn’t just go around saying it was tough to be you. It sounded like you were whining, and Hugo hated whining. Indeed, a recent statistical analysis of Hugo’s columns for The Record, carried out, ironically enough, by some whining liberal hoping to eviscerate Hugo through his use of language, had revealed that whining was his most commonly used term, beating out liberal, conspiracy, politically correct, and ‘Multicultural’, which Hugo always both capitalised and placed in inverted commas.

  The trick to being Hugo was that both Hugos – outspoken and restrained – had to get out of bed at the same time and work in happy tandem through the course of the day. Not that Outspoken Hugo ever had a day off,
of course. Give Outspoken Hugo a Pall Mall, a bacon sandwich, and a cup of coffee the colour of a person Restrained Hugo would caution Outspoken Hugo against mentioning, and Outspoken Hugo was good for several hours of good old-fashioned common sense. Restrained Hugo, on the other hand, was a different beast entirely. Restrained Hugo liked to sleep in late, let Outspoken Hugo get going, and then panic later, when Outspoken Hugo, left unsupervised, said something he wasn’t supposed to say. This had, unfortunately, happened more than once, and the consensus in Hugo’s party was that it needed to happen a whole lot less, and so measures had been taken. These measures took the form of Teddy, who, with Hugo’s begrudging agreement, now let himself into Hugo’s kitchen every morning and waited for Hugo to get up so as to ensure that all Hugos were present and correct, meaning Hugo had been forced to instigate a counter-measure by which, after brushing his teeth and getting dressed, he snuck out the back door for a fag and a few moments of peace – the word by which Hugo euphemistically described his first deep, burning haul of the morning, the protracted coughing fit and the lingering wilt against the wall with his fingers pressed into the space between his eyes while he waited out the inevitable head rush.

  Hugo’s health was complicated. To the casual observer, he appeared reasonably fit. He was slim, compact. His face, when not bloodless with almost fainting, often bore what appeared to be a perfectly healthy glow. He made efforts, at all times, to appear hale and hearty and possessed of what at least one newspaper column had described as an inexhaustible energy. The implications of this were, politically, critical. A great deal of his message was built around the idea that Britain was in a dreadful state, and that there was, as a result, a great deal of work to do. It was no good, according to Teddy, telling all and sundry how much difficult work lay ahead if you looked like you were about to crumple into an exhausted heap at the merest suggestion of effort. Instead, he had to project an aura of invincibility, an impression of infinite reserves.